This is not an easy bug to reproduce because you need an unresponsive RMQ instance. However, "timeout" should send the KILL (9) signal if we really want to make sure the monitoring process is terminated. Other signals may be caught, so the "timeout" option wouldn't effectively terminate the rabbitmqctl process.
OTOH, I think the collect_rabbitmq_stats.sh script writes into a temporary output file and then moves it to the final destination. If that is correct, the output file would not be updated and the check introduced on bug 1898523 would catch that a problem exists (because the mtime of the file is too old).
This is not an easy bug to reproduce because you need an unresponsive RMQ instance. However, "timeout" should send the KILL (9) signal if we really want to make sure the monitoring process is terminated. Other signals may be caught, so the "timeout" option wouldn't effectively terminate the rabbitmqctl process.
OTOH, I think the collect_ rabbitmq_ stats.sh script writes into a temporary output file and then moves it to the final destination. If that is correct, the output file would not be updated and the check introduced on bug 1898523 would catch that a problem exists (because the mtime of the file is too old).