Real-time server activity monitoring

We covered some of the basics of monitoring your server all the way back in Chapter 1, Let's Get Started, which used the ngxtop utility to provide basic command line driven monitoring and statistics. Included in NGINX Plus is a powerful and comprehensive metrics system to show you real-time activity for your NGINX server.

As you'll see in the upcoming screenshots, this is quite a comprehensive system. Not only does it include a web interface so that you can see the stats, but this data is also available as a JSON feed so that it can be directly imported by external monitoring tools.

Getting ready

As this is part of the NGINX Plus packages, you'll need to ensure you have NGINX Plus installed and configured correctly. You can test to ensure you have NGINX Plus by running nginx -v. This should give you an output similar to the following:

nginx version: nginx/1.11.10 (nginx-plus-r12-p3)

The important part to check is the plus in the naming for nginx-plus-r12-p3...