How to Monitor NGiNX

Keep track of your NGiNX server performance metrics such as requests per second, active connections and more.

NGiNX provides various metrics thru their status page (requires the stub status module). Setting up monitoring for NGiNX with Nixstats is easy, you can read more at our helpdesk.

Important NGiNX Metrics

The most important metrics to watch and alert to for NGiNX are writing, active and requests_per_second. Besides this we recommend setting up alert through logging. You might want to setup a daily alert which will alert you of any new entries in the error logs of nginx.

NGiNX Metrics

The following metrics are available from the NGiNX monitoring plugin. Source code is available on GitHub.

  • Accepts per second

    The amount of accepted client connections per second.

  • Handled per second

    The amount of handled client connections per second.

  • Requests per second

    Amount of requests per second processed.

  • Accepts

    Total amount of accepted client connections.

  • Handled

    Total amount of handled client connections.

  • Requests

    Total amount of requests processed.

  • Reading

    Current number of connections where nginx is reading the request header.

  • Writing

    Current number of connections where nginx is returning the response back to the client.

  • Waiting

    Current number of idle client connections.

  • Active

    Current number of active client connections.

  • Top request locations

    The top requested paths. Requires logging to be setup.

  • HTTP status codes

    HTTP status codes parsed from your access logs. Requires logging to be setup.

  • Errors

    NGiNX error logs entries. Requires logging to be setup.