NGINX monitoring integration

Our NGINX integration collects and sends inventory and metrics from your NGINX server to our platform, where you can see data on connections and client requests so that you can find the source of any problems.

Read on to install the integration, and to see what data we collect.

Compatibility and requirements

Our integration is compatible with both NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus.

Before installing the integration, make sure that you meet the following requirements:

Install and activate the integration

To install the NGINX integration, follow the instructions for your environment:

ECS

See Monitor service running on ECS.

Kubernetes

See Monitor service running on Kubernetes.

Linux

  1. Follow the general instructions for installing an integration, using the filename nri-nginx. Then continue on to the steps below.

  2. Change the directory to the integrations configuration folder:

    cd /etc/newrelic-infra/integrations.d

  3. Copy the sample configuration file:

    sudo cp nginx-config.yml.sample nginx-config.yml

  4. Edit the configuration file nginx-config.yml.

  5. Restart the infrastructure agent.

Additional notes:

Configure the integration

An integration's YAML-format configuration is where you can place required login credentials and configure how data is collected. Which options you change depend on your setup and preference.

To capture data from the NGINX integration, you must first enable and configure the applicable extension module:

There are several ways to configure the integration, depending on how it was installed:

Config options include:

  • metrics: This command captures the metrics of a particular NGINX server. Arguments:

    • status_url: The URL set up to provide the metrics using the status module. If the default value of 127.0.0.1 is incorrect, substitute the address/FQDN/URL for your system. Example:

      status_url: http://127.0.0.1/status
  • inventory: This command captures the configuration parameters set in the NGINX config file as inventory data. Arguments:

    • config_path: The path to the NGINX configuration file.

    • status_url: The URL is used to attach inventory data to the same NGINX instance for which we collect metrics.

    To disable inventory data collection, remove the inventory command.

    When running in a container, to retrieve inventory data you need to map the local config_path into the container, otherwise the integration terminates. See instructions for Docker on how to map volumes to share files between the host and the container.

    For Kubernetes, ECS, and potentially other environments where you can have more than one instance running, inventory is complex to configure. We strongly suggest disabling inventory in this case.

  • labels: The env label controls the environment attribute. The default value is production.

Activate remote monitoring

You can use the remote_monitoring configuration parameter to enable remote monitoring and multi-tenancy for this integration. You must also have infrastructure agent version 1.2.25 or higher to use remote_monitoring.

Activating remote_monitoring may change some attributes and/or affect your configured alerts. For more information, see remote monitoring in on-host integrations.

Environment variable passthroughs

Environment variables can be used to control config settings, such as your license key, and are then passed through to the Infrastructure agent. For instructions on how to use this feature, see Configure the Infrastructure agent.

With secrets management, you can configure on-host integrations with New Relic Infrastructure's agent to use sensitive data (such as passwords) without having to write them as plain text into the integration's configuration file. For more information, see Secrets management.

STATUS_URL

The URL set up to provide the metrics using the status module.

Type String
Default http://127.0.0.1/status

Example:

STATUS_URL='http://your.ip.address:8080/status'
CONFIG_PATH

The path to the NGINX configuration file.

Type String
Default /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Example:

CONFIG_PATH='/etc/nginx/custom/mynginx.conf'

For more about the general structure of on-host integration configuration, see Configuration.

Find and use data

Data from this service is reported to an integration dashboard.

Metrics are attached to the NginxSample event type. You can query this data for troubleshooting purposes or to create custom charts and dashboards.

For more on how to find and use your data, see Understand integration data.

Metrics

The NGINX integration collects the following metric data attributes. To find these attributes, query the NginxSample event type.

Metric Description
net.connectionsActive Number of connections that are currently active
net.connectionsAcceptedPerSecond Number of accepted client connections per second
net.connectionsDroppedPerSecond Number of connections per second that were accepted but could not he handled and hence dropped
net.connectionsReading Current number of connections where NGINX is reading the request header
net.connectionsWaiting Current number of idle client connections waiting for a request
net.connectionsWriting Current number of connections where NGINX is writing the response back to the client
net.requestsPerSecond Total number of client requests per second

Our integration retrieves all available metric data from the following HTTP API endpoints: /nginx, /processes, /connections, /http/requests, and /ssl.

Metric Description
net.connectionsAcceptedPerSecond Accepted client connections as requests per second
net.connectionsDroppedPerSecond Dropped client connections as requests per second
net.connectionsActive Current number of active client connections
net.connectionsIdle Current number of idle client connections
net.requests Current number of requests
net.requestsPerSecond Current number of requests per second
processes.respawned Current number of abnormally terminated and respawned child processes
ssl.handshakes Current number for successful SSL handshakes
ssl.failedHandshakes Current number of failed SSL handshakes
ssl.sessionReuses Current number of session reuses during SSL handshake

Inventory data

The integration captures configuration options defined in the NGINX master config file (usually nginx.conf).

The master NGINX config file can contain "include OTHER_FILE_NAME" commands for splitting the configuration into multiple files. The Infrastructure agent ignores (does not parse) configuration set via include commands.

System metadata

The integration collects these additional attributes about the NGINX service:

Name Description
software.edition

The NGINX edition: either "open source" or "plus".
software.version The version of NGINX.

Check the source code

This integration is open source software. That means you can browse its source code and send improvements, or create your own fork and build it.

For more help

If you need more help, check out these support and learning resources: