NGINX Monitoring Tool - NGINX Web Server Performance Monitoring

What is an NGINX server?

NGINX is an open-source web server software that offers reverse proxy, email proxy, HTTP caching services, and load balancing on a massive scale. NGINX was originally created to solve the C10k problem—the challenge of handling 10,000 user connections at the same time. NGINX can provide high performance for web servers handling so many users at once, and it’s a popular choice for companies providing high-traffic webpages.

NGINX is often used because it runs quickly and uses resources efficiently. For example, NGINX uses a master and worker process structure instead of creating a process per user. The master process manages the worker processes and handles privileged operations like reading configurations or binding ports. The worker processes manage network connections, read/write operations, and communication with other servers. This structure is considered useful for handling extreme loads and powering faster performance.

NGINX is considered to have excellent scalability because of the way it handles concurrent connections. NGINX separates the connections from the actual processing of said connections, which means a single NGINX thread can handle thousands of concurrent connections as long as the processor speeds can keep up. This ensures memory and CPU usage remain consistent.

NGINX is designed to be a lightweight, scalable, and extremely powerful web server that’s ideal for static content. However, an NGINX monitoring tool can help you get the most out of NGINX.

What is an NGINX monitoring tool?

An NGINX monitoring tool is built to provide comprehensive insights into the availability and performance of NGINX web servers, by offering alerting, reporting, and overall server management capabilities. NGINX performance monitoring tools are designed to monitor metrics that make web server performance monitoring for NGINX much easier.

Accurate and effective NGINX monitoring helps admins test the efficacy of their servers, troubleshoot performance issues in real time, and identify potential issues before they start to affect end-users. But performing NGINX monitoring without an NGINX monitoring tool would be a full-time job in itself. NGINX performance monitoring tools like SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) help maximize your time and effort by streamlining and automating the most time-consuming aspects of NGINX monitoring.

What are important NGINX performance metrics?

Important NGINX monitoring metrics can be divided into two broad categories—metrics related to NGINX itself and metrics related to its underlying infrastructure. Each metric represents the potential threshold for that aspect of the system, and ideally, both your web server and infrastructure will be able to operate efficiently without coming close to these thresholds.

The four most important NGINX-specific monitoring metrics are:

• Current Connections: This metric shows the number of active and waiting connections in NGINX, including the connections attributed to active users and automated bots. To find out how many active connections your NGINX configuration can handle, multiply the number of worker connections by the number of worker processes. Once the limit is reached, NGINX will start dropping connections.


• Current Requests: This metric indicates the total of number requests coming into the web server.


• Connections Processed: This metric shows how many connections have been accepted and handled by NGINX, including connections that eventually get dropped.


• Response Time: Response time is an indication of how quickly NGINX is handling requests. This metric is key to NGINX performance monitoring and analysis.

The six most important infrastructure-specific metrics to keep an eye on during NGINX monitoring include:

• CPU Usage: This metric indicates the processing usage of the underlying machine. If you’re using a multi-core machine, make sure CPU usage is measured as utilization across all cores.


• Network Bandwidth: Network bandwidth is a theoretical measure of how much data could be transferred from a source at any given time. Be sure to measure load units here as well. 


• Memory Usage: This metric measures how much memory is currently in use on the machine.


• Disk Usage: Even if NGINX isn’t physically storing files on the host machine, the server will still need space for logging, temporary files, and other supporting files.


• Swap Usage: When a machine runs out of memory or the memory region has gone unused for an extended period, the machine starts using swap space. NGINX performance will be significantly slower if it’s running on swap, which is why it’s typically only used in emergencies. If, after NGINX monitoring, you notice your machine is using swap space, this usually indicates an underlying issue needs to be addressed.


• Load: Load is an NGINX performance monitoring metric that boils down a variety of other metrics into a simple number. Generally, the load on the machine should always be less than the number of processing cores.

What are the differences between an NGINX OSS and NGINX Plus server?

NGINX OSS is open-source software that’s free to use and download. NGINX Plus is a paid, fully supported web server and load balancer and can be built on top of open-source NGINX.

Public cloud, private cloud, bare-metal environments, virtual machines, or containers can use NGINX Plus to deliver static assets with unmatched speed. NGINX Plus can help admins save time by automating common tasks through the built-in NGINX Plus API.

Other notable features of NGINX Plus that aren’t available in NGINX OSS include:

• Active health checks
• Cache-purging API
• JWT authentication
• NGINX Web Application Firewall 
• Dynamic module repository
  
   

NGINX Plus is best suited for enterprises that have tried NGINX OSS in the past and want to reduce complexity, do a massive amount of HTTP streaming, or want to transition their web architectures from a monolithic application to a lightweight, distributed, cloud-friendly architecture.

You should consider using NGINX open source if you:

• Want to view or edit the source code
• Want to compile in third-party modules that aren’t available in NGINX Plus or the dynamic modules repository, or want to create their own custom modules
• Want to manage security fixes themselves
• Are working in an environment that doesn’t require robust support 
  
   

When it comes to NGINX OSS vs. NGINX Plus, consider how much you’re willing to code, how many features you need for the enterprise, and how important technical support and an online community are to you.

How does the NGINX monitoring tool work in SAM?

Configuring and managing NGINX can be challenging. Even if you manage to configure NGINX correctly, NGINX monitoring is often a complex and time-consuming process.

Some NGINX performance monitoring tools are difficult to configure and can have tedious workflows for capturing even the most basic NGINX monitoring metrics. With these tools, there’s not an easy way to monitor infrastructure dependencies, making it much harder to find and remediate problems.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is a robust NGINX monitoring tool built to help you more effectively monitor NGINX and quickly pinpoint the root cause of performance issues faster. From one tool, you can monitor your entire on-premises, cloud, and hybrid application environment. The included 1,200+ out-of-the-box and available 1,000 community application monitoring templates can also make it easier to keep an eye on your entire system.

SAM has numerous features designed to facilitate fast and effective NGINX monitoring. This software can help you keep track of key NGINX performance monitoring metrics like requests per second and request processing time, so you can ensure NGINX is running optimally. Dependency mapping and cross-stack IT data correlation features can also help you drill down on performance issues and isolate root causes as soon as possible.