NGINX Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. Advanced Activity Monitoring

13.0 Introduction

To ensure that your application is running at optimal performance and precision, you need insight into the monitoring metrics about its activity. NGINX offers various monitoring options such as stub status or an advanced monitoring dashboard and a JSON feed in NGINX Plus. The NGINX Plus activity monitoring provides insight into requests, upstream server pools, caching, health, and more. Further application integrated observability is also available with the use of OpenTelemetry. This chapter details the power and possibilities of monitoring with NGINX.

13.1 Enable NGINX Stub Status

Problem

You need to enable basic monitoring for NGINX.

Solution

Enable the stub_status module in a location block within an NGINX HTTP server:

location /stub_status {
  stub_status;
  allow 127.0.0.1;
  deny all;
  # Set IP restrictions as appropriate
}

Test your configuration by making a request for the status:

$ curl localhost/stub_status
Active connections: 1 
server accepts handled requests
 1 1 1 
Reading: 0 Writing: 1 Waiting: 0 

Discussion

The stub_status module enables some basic monitoring of the NGINX server. The information that is returned provides insight into the number of active connections, as well as the total connections accepted, connections handled, and requests served. The current number of connections being read, written, or in a waiting state is also shown. The information provided is global and is not specific ...