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:

• NGINX extension enabled, as described in the Configure the integration section.
• If NGINX is not running on Kubernetes or Amazon ECS, you must install the infrastructure agent on a Linux OS host that's running NGINX. Otherwise:
  • If running on Kubernetes, see these requirements.
  • If running on ECS, see these requirements.

Quick start

Instrument your NGINX server quickly and send your telemetry data with guided install. Our guided install creates a customized CLI command for your environment that downloads and installs the New Relic CLI and the infrastructure agent.

Install and activate the integration

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

Additional notes:

• Advanced: Integrations are also available in tarball format to allow for install outside of a package manager.
• On-host integrations do not automatically update. For best results, regularly update the integration package and the infrastructure agent.

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:

• For NGINX Open Source: HTTP stub status module
• For NGINX Plus: HTTP status module and HTTP API module

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

• If enabled via Kubernetes: see Monitor services running on Kubernetes.
• If enabled via Amazon ECS: see Monitor services running on ECS.
• If installed on-host: edit the config in the integration's YAML config file, nginx-config.yml.

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

    Copy

• 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.

  Important

  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.

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.

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

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.

NGINX Open Source

NGINX Plus

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

Inventory data

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

System metadata

The integration collects these additional attributes about the NGINX service:

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.