Get complete visibility into your NGINX web servers with OpenTelemetry integration. This solution uses the OpenTelemetry Collector and nginxreceiver to automatically collect and send performance data, connection statistics, and operational insights to New Relic.
Dashboard available through the New Relic NGINX OpenTelemetry Monitor quickstart.
Important
- To monitor NGINX Plus, see Monitor NGINX Plus with OpenTelemetry.
- To monitor NGINX on Kubernetes, see Monitor NGINX on Kubernetes with OpenTelemetry.
- Ready to implement? Continue to NGINX OpenTelemetry setup guide.
Why monitor NGINX with OpenTelemetry?
NGINX monitoring is essential for maintaining web application performance and reliability. OpenTelemetry provides a standardized approach to collect and analyze this critical data.
Key benefits
- Performance optimization: Identify bottlenecks, track response times, make data-driven scaling decisions
- Proactive monitoring: Get alerts before user impact, detect issues early
- Operational insights: Understand traffic patterns, track SLA compliance, maintain audit trails
- Future-proof: Open-source OpenTelemetry standard, vendor-neutral integration
Use case
Whether you're running an e-commerce website, API gateway, or content delivery platform, NGINX monitoring helps you maintain fast, reliable web services. Get notified when your checkout process slows down, detect when your API endpoints are overwhelmed, or identify which geographic regions are experiencing issues. This monitoring is essential for websites handling customer transactions, mobile app backends, microservices architectures, and any web application where downtime or slow performance directly impacts your users and business.
Available metrics
The OpenTelemetry Collector automatically collects key NGINX performance metrics including connection statistics, request counts, and server health indicators.
Key metrics collected:
- Connection metrics - Active, accepted, handled connections and their states
- Request metrics - Total requests and request rates over time
- Server health - Connection efficiency and performance indicators
For complete metrics and attributes reference: See NGINX OpenTelemetry metrics and attributes reference for detailed descriptions, metric types, and resource attributes for both on-host and Kubernetes deployments.
Next steps
Ready to start monitoring your NGINX servers?
Continue to the implementation guide:
- NGINX OpenTelemetry setup guide - Complete step-by-step instructions for configuration, setup, and troubleshooting
Explore related monitoring options:
- Monitor NGINX Plus with OpenTelemetry - For commercial NGINX Plus deployments
- Monitor NGINX on Kubernetes - For containerized environments
Learn more about OpenTelemetry:
- OpenTelemetry best practices - Optimize your OpenTelemetry setup
- OpenTelemetry Collector documentation - Comprehensive collector reference