What Is NGINX Monitoring?
Learn how to monitor NGINX with metrics, logging, and insights.
What Is NGINX Monitoring?
NGINX Server Definition
To truly understand NGINX monitoring, it’s essential to understand the NGINX server. NGINX was created to be the fastest web server, offering exceptional performance and stability.
However, the scalable underlying architecture of NGINX makes its servers more than powerful web server software solutions. It also enables NGINX servers to provide HTTP caching, load balancing, media streaming, reverse proxy, and email proxy on a large scale.
Companies with high-traffic webpages can benefit from using NGINX, as it offers the high level of performance required to support thousands of users simultaneously. In fact, the software engineer Igor Sysoev created NGINX to solve the C10k problem, allowing web servers to handle 10,000 client connections at the same time. As a result, NGINX is not only fast but also incredibly efficient in its resource usage.
Instead of creating one process per user, NGINX uses a master and worker process structure. The master process is responsible for managing the worker processes, reading configurations, binding ports, and more. Meanwhile, the worker processes handle network connections, server communications, and read/write operations. This structure allows the NGINX server to successfully handle large loads while maintaining fast performance, making it an excellent option for organizations that require scalability.
Additionally, NGINX separates connections from their processing. This means a single NGINX thread can handle thousands of connections at the same time while maintaining consistent memory and CPU usage.
NGINX Monitoring Definition
NGINX monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing the performance, availability, and security of NGINX web servers.
With proper NGINX server monitoring and NGINX performance monitoring, you can more easily identify, diagnose, and resolve errors, reduce downtime, and gain better visibility into everything happening on your NGINX server both in real time and over a defined period. Ultimately, monitoring NGINX instance performance allows you to ensure that your server operates as securely and efficiently as possible, delivering a seamless experience for end users.
Manually monitoring NGINX requires a little work. You can use the ngx_http_stub_status_module (or stub_status module for short) to gain some insights. You can run nginx -V by typing $ nginx -V 2>&1 | grep --color -- --with-http_stub_status_module and then include the stub_status directive in a location block to enable the module in your NGINX configuration. It’s also possible to add a separate server block and create a single specialized location for your stub_status directive. Then, ensure access to the metric is restricted to authorized users by using the allow and deny directives in your location or server block. Finally, you can display your NGINX server monitoring stub_status metrics by making a curl query.
Additionally, you can examine the NGINX log files to gain insights into NGINX performance and errors. Access logs provide details about incoming requests, including response times and status codes, while error logs capture details about critical issues and failures.
Differences Between NGINX Open-Source Software and NGINX Plus
There are two forms of NGINX: NGINX open-source software (OSS) and NGINX Plus.
NGINX OSS is a free web server ideal for users who don’t require extensive support. With NGINX OSS, you’ll need to manage security fixes independently. However, you can easily view and edit the NGINX source code and compile third-party modules that aren’t already included in NGINX Plus or the dynamic modules repository. You can also create custom modules to suit your organization’s unique needs when using NGINX OSS.
While NGINX OSS is powerful, it lacks many of the enterprise-level features NGINX Plus offers. NGINX Plus is a fully supported web server and load balancer. It builds on the open-source version of NGINX, supports more extensive HTTP streaming, and is well suited for deployment in public clouds, private clouds, virtual machines, and containers.
NGINX Plus includes the NGINX Web Application Firewall, a cache-purging API, and access to a dynamic module repository. It also provides active health checks and JavaScript Object Notation web token authentication. Additionally, NGINX Plus can save valuable time with its built-in API, which automates common tasks quickly and reliably, freeing you to focus on more important priorities.
Key NGINX Metrics to Monitor
There are a few key NGINX server monitoring metrics to pay attention to for effective NGINX performance monitoring. Specifically, you will want to look at:
- Current connections: By monitoring the number of active and waiting connections in NGINX generated by active users and automated bots, you can gain insights into your NGINX server’s load and capacity.
- Current requests: The current requests NGINX monitoring represents the total number of requests your NGINX web server receives. It is often expressed as requests per second and allows you to identify traffic patterns and detect anomalies that may indicate server issues or malicious activity.
- Response time: Understanding how long it takes NGINX to respond to client requests is critical to ensuring a smooth user experience. High response times may indicate overloaded servers, inefficient configurations, or slow backend services.
- CPU and memory usage: It’s important to keep an eye on resource consumption when monitoring NGINX servers to ensure they are running efficiently. Excessive CPU and memory usage can lead to poor performance, slow response times, or crashes.
- Disk usage: Although the NGINX server doesn’t store files on machines physically, it still uses disk space for temporary files, logging, and supporting files.
- Swap usage: Keeping track of swap usage is crucial, as NGINX performance slows down significantly when running on swap space. This happens when your machine runs out of memory or if you don’t use the memory region for an extended period of time. Swap usage not only results in increased response times but also opens the door for server instability. It can also point to an underlying issue with your NGINX server.
- Errors: It’s a good idea to monitor errors of all types, such as authentication, application, processing, and timeout errors. Tracking these can help you identify when to adjust server configurations, allocate additional resources, and more.
Troubleshooting Common Issues
When monitoring NGINX, one of the most common issues you may encounter is high response times and slow performance. If your NGINX server is responding slowly, check your CPU and memory usage NGINX performance monitoring metrics to ensure the system isn’t overloaded. High CPU usage may indicate poorly optimized configurations, excessive request processing, or inefficient backend services, while an unusually high number of active connections or requests per second could point to traffic spikes or distributed denial of service attacks. You may need to optimize your server configurations, adjust load balancing to better distribute the workload, or enable caching.
You may also encounter excessive error rates and failed requests. A surge in 4xx errors could indicate misconfigured client requests, authentication failures, or broken links. In contrast, an increase in 5xx errors suggests server-side issues, such as backend failures, misconfigured proxy settings, or NGINX misconfigurations. Check your access logs and error logs for more details on these failures.
If you’re missing NGINX monitoring metrics entirely, you may need to check the ngx_http_stub_status_module is enabled and correctly configured.
What Is an NGINX Monitoring Tool?
NGINX monitoring requires significant time and effort, especially when done manually. Not only do you need to track key NGINX performance metrics, such as active client connections, request rates, response times, and error rates, but you must also collect and analyze logs, configure NGINX alerts, and check that all the appropriate security measures are in place. NGINX monitoring can quickly become overwhelming, particularly as traffic increases or you need to manage more servers. This is where NGINX monitoring tools come in.
An NGINX monitoring tool can automatically collect and analyze vital NGINX server metrics, providing insights into performance issues, helping you troubleshoot errors, and enabling you to optimize configurations. With an NGINX monitoring tool, you can reduce your manual workload, improve server reliability, and proactively address issues.
What Is NGINX Monitoring?
NGINX Server Definition
To truly understand NGINX monitoring, it’s essential to understand the NGINX server. NGINX was created to be the fastest web server, offering exceptional performance and stability.
However, the scalable underlying architecture of NGINX makes its servers more than powerful web server software solutions. It also enables NGINX servers to provide HTTP caching, load balancing, media streaming, reverse proxy, and email proxy on a large scale.
Companies with high-traffic webpages can benefit from using NGINX, as it offers the high level of performance required to support thousands of users simultaneously. In fact, the software engineer Igor Sysoev created NGINX to solve the C10k problem, allowing web servers to handle 10,000 client connections at the same time. As a result, NGINX is not only fast but also incredibly efficient in its resource usage.
Instead of creating one process per user, NGINX uses a master and worker process structure. The master process is responsible for managing the worker processes, reading configurations, binding ports, and more. Meanwhile, the worker processes handle network connections, server communications, and read/write operations. This structure allows the NGINX server to successfully handle large loads while maintaining fast performance, making it an excellent option for organizations that require scalability.
Additionally, NGINX separates connections from their processing. This means a single NGINX thread can handle thousands of connections at the same time while maintaining consistent memory and CPU usage.
NGINX Monitoring Definition
NGINX monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing the performance, availability, and security of NGINX web servers.
With proper NGINX server monitoring and NGINX performance monitoring, you can more easily identify, diagnose, and resolve errors, reduce downtime, and gain better visibility into everything happening on your NGINX server both in real time and over a defined period. Ultimately, monitoring NGINX instance performance allows you to ensure that your server operates as securely and efficiently as possible, delivering a seamless experience for end users.
Manually monitoring NGINX requires a little work. You can use the ngx_http_stub_status_module (or stub_status module for short) to gain some insights. You can run nginx -V by typing $ nginx -V 2>&1 | grep --color -- --with-http_stub_status_module and then include the stub_status directive in a location block to enable the module in your NGINX configuration. It’s also possible to add a separate server block and create a single specialized location for your stub_status directive. Then, ensure access to the metric is restricted to authorized users by using the allow and deny directives in your location or server block. Finally, you can display your NGINX server monitoring stub_status metrics by making a curl query.
Additionally, you can examine the NGINX log files to gain insights into NGINX performance and errors. Access logs provide details about incoming requests, including response times and status codes, while error logs capture details about critical issues and failures.
Differences Between NGINX Open-Source Software and NGINX Plus
There are two forms of NGINX: NGINX open-source software (OSS) and NGINX Plus.
NGINX OSS is a free web server ideal for users who don’t require extensive support. With NGINX OSS, you’ll need to manage security fixes independently. However, you can easily view and edit the NGINX source code and compile third-party modules that aren’t already included in NGINX Plus or the dynamic modules repository. You can also create custom modules to suit your organization’s unique needs when using NGINX OSS.
While NGINX OSS is powerful, it lacks many of the enterprise-level features NGINX Plus offers. NGINX Plus is a fully supported web server and load balancer. It builds on the open-source version of NGINX, supports more extensive HTTP streaming, and is well suited for deployment in public clouds, private clouds, virtual machines, and containers.
NGINX Plus includes the NGINX Web Application Firewall, a cache-purging API, and access to a dynamic module repository. It also provides active health checks and JavaScript Object Notation web token authentication. Additionally, NGINX Plus can save valuable time with its built-in API, which automates common tasks quickly and reliably, freeing you to focus on more important priorities.
Key NGINX Metrics to Monitor
There are a few key NGINX server monitoring metrics to pay attention to for effective NGINX performance monitoring. Specifically, you will want to look at:
- Current connections: By monitoring the number of active and waiting connections in NGINX generated by active users and automated bots, you can gain insights into your NGINX server’s load and capacity.
- Current requests: The current requests NGINX monitoring represents the total number of requests your NGINX web server receives. It is often expressed as requests per second and allows you to identify traffic patterns and detect anomalies that may indicate server issues or malicious activity.
- Response time: Understanding how long it takes NGINX to respond to client requests is critical to ensuring a smooth user experience. High response times may indicate overloaded servers, inefficient configurations, or slow backend services.
- CPU and memory usage: It’s important to keep an eye on resource consumption when monitoring NGINX servers to ensure they are running efficiently. Excessive CPU and memory usage can lead to poor performance, slow response times, or crashes.
- Disk usage: Although the NGINX server doesn’t store files on machines physically, it still uses disk space for temporary files, logging, and supporting files.
- Swap usage: Keeping track of swap usage is crucial, as NGINX performance slows down significantly when running on swap space. This happens when your machine runs out of memory or if you don’t use the memory region for an extended period of time. Swap usage not only results in increased response times but also opens the door for server instability. It can also point to an underlying issue with your NGINX server.
- Errors: It’s a good idea to monitor errors of all types, such as authentication, application, processing, and timeout errors. Tracking these can help you identify when to adjust server configurations, allocate additional resources, and more.
Troubleshooting Common Issues
When monitoring NGINX, one of the most common issues you may encounter is high response times and slow performance. If your NGINX server is responding slowly, check your CPU and memory usage NGINX performance monitoring metrics to ensure the system isn’t overloaded. High CPU usage may indicate poorly optimized configurations, excessive request processing, or inefficient backend services, while an unusually high number of active connections or requests per second could point to traffic spikes or distributed denial of service attacks. You may need to optimize your server configurations, adjust load balancing to better distribute the workload, or enable caching.
You may also encounter excessive error rates and failed requests. A surge in 4xx errors could indicate misconfigured client requests, authentication failures, or broken links. In contrast, an increase in 5xx errors suggests server-side issues, such as backend failures, misconfigured proxy settings, or NGINX misconfigurations. Check your access logs and error logs for more details on these failures.
If you’re missing NGINX monitoring metrics entirely, you may need to check the ngx_http_stub_status_module is enabled and correctly configured.
What Is an NGINX Monitoring Tool?
NGINX monitoring requires significant time and effort, especially when done manually. Not only do you need to track key NGINX performance metrics, such as active client connections, request rates, response times, and error rates, but you must also collect and analyze logs, configure NGINX alerts, and check that all the appropriate security measures are in place. NGINX monitoring can quickly become overwhelming, particularly as traffic increases or you need to manage more servers. This is where NGINX monitoring tools come in.
An NGINX monitoring tool can automatically collect and analyze vital NGINX server metrics, providing insights into performance issues, helping you troubleshoot errors, and enabling you to optimize configurations. With an NGINX monitoring tool, you can reduce your manual workload, improve server reliability, and proactively address issues.
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