How To monitor basic metrics from NGINX with Prometheus and Grafana

Introduction

I don’t know why me write & post this is article, maybe because I’m motivated learning about monitoring tools like a Grafana & prometheus. Okay and now I will explain to you about best pratical How To monitor basic metrics from NGINX with Prometheus and Grafana, for your apps , maybe this is basic implementation but not bad for first learning.

First i will explain topology or concept how nginx exporter working to prometheus on this picture

Preparation : I recomended for you read my previous article that explains installation grafana & prometheus in the following link https://igunawan.com/how-to-monitor-mysql-deployments-with-prometheus-grafana-at-mysql-overview/

Actually this configuration is very simple, by activating the sub status module in nginx , and I look refrence for here http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.html

There are several configuration steps below:

Step Installation 1 – Install & Enable configure stub status Nginx

Example configuration below, this will create a HTTP server on port 9113 only available from localhost and configuration in nginx.conf

server {
        listen localhost:9113;
        location /metrics {
                stub_status on;
        }
}

Make sure to restart the NGINX service

service nginx restart

and This is what the /metrics endpoint will look like

curl http://your_ip:9113/metrics

Active connections: 2 
server accepts handled requests
 1468 1468 7418 
Reading: 0 Writing: 1 Waiting: 1

Step Installation 2 – Install nginx prometheus exporter & configure

Import exporter nginx from github and running several syntax on below

wget https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-prometheus-exporter/releases/download/v0.7.0/nginx-prometheus-exporter-0.7.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz

Extract file exporter

tar -xf nginx-prometheus-exporter-0.7.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz

Move file to usr/local/bin and create user for nginx exporter

mv nginx-prometheus-exporter /usr/local/bin/

user add -r nginx_exporter

And then Create Systemd Service File configruation for bridge to data source prometheus

nano /etc/systemd/system/nginx_prometheus_exporter.service

[Unit]
Description=NGINX Prometheus Exporter
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=nginx_exporter
Group=nginx_exporter
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/nginx-prometheus-exporter \
    -web.listen-address=0.0.0.0:9113 \
    -nginx.scrape-uri http://IP_hostnginx:9113/metrics

SyslogIdentifier=nginx_prometheus_exporter
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Activate service nginx exporter with following syntax :

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart nginx_prometheus_exporter
systemctl status nginx_prometheus_exporter

Testing with curl http://ip_nginx:9113/metrics

Step Installation 3 – Add endpoint nginx & create display on grafana

Now just tell prometheus to scrape the exporter, add jobs on prometheus.yml

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: prometheus
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9090']
        labels:
          alias: prometheus

  - job_name: server_nginx
    scrape_interval: 5s
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['0.0.0.0:9113']
        labels:
          alias: nginx_server

Then restart service prometheus and check on the dashboard target promtheus status up for server_nginx

systemctl restart prometheus 
systemctl status prometheus

2. Add display dashboard for Nginx overview

This is an example of a grafana dashboard taken from Nginx using “nginx overview” , for a dashboard/template you can import it from the official grafana documentation https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/9516-nginx-general-overview/

This display is simple, but quite informative, because it provides information on the status of the nginx service up/down, active connection, connection process rate and total request.

Thanks