NGINX and NGINX Plus - Monitoring Extension

By:
smoustahssen
AppDynamics supported
Updated July 26, 2016, 12:42 a.m.

This extension works only with the standalone machine agent.

Use Case

NGINX (open source) and NGINX Plus (commercial) is an HTTP server and reverse proxy, and an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. The NGINX and NGINX Plus monitoring extension gets metrics from the NGINX server and displays them in the AppDynamics Metric Browser. This extension supports both the open source NGINX and its commercial variant NGINX Plus.

Metrics include:

Active connections
Total number of requests
Accepted and handled requests
Reading, writing, and waiting

Installation

Note: For the following steps to work, NGINX should be running with "ngx_http_stub_status_module" or "ngx_http_status_module" enabled. Please make sure you have required changes in the nginx.conf.

Download and Unzip the file NginxMonitor.zip into <machineagent install dir>/monitors/
Open monitor.xml and configure the arguments
Restart the machineagent
In the AppDynamics Metric Browser, look for: Application Infrastructure Performance | <Tier> | Custom Metrics | WebServer | NGinX.

Directory Structure

Directory/File	Description
src/main/resources/conf	Contains the monitor.xml
src/main/java	Contains source code of the NGINX/NGINX Plus monitoring extension
target	Only obtained when using maven. Run 'mvn clean install' to get the distributable .zip file
pom.xml	Maven build script to package the project (required only if changing Java code)

Metrics

NGINX Metrics

Metric Name	Description
Active Connections	Number of all open active connections
Server: Accepts	Number of accepted requests
Server: Handled	Number of handled requests
Server: Requests	Total number of requests
Reading	Nginx reads request header
Writing	Nginx reads request body, processes request, or writes response to a client
Waiting	NGinX keep-alive connections or currently active

NGINX Plus Metrics

Requests

Metric Name	Description
total	The total number of client requests
current	The current number of client requests

Server Zones

Metric Name	Description
processing	The number of client requests that are currently being processed
requests	The total number of client requests received from clients
responses/total	The total number of responses sent to clients
responses/ 1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx	The number of responses with status codes 1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx
received	The total number of bytes received from clients
sent	The total number of bytes sent to clients

Upstreams

Metric Name	Description
active	The current number of active connections
backup	A boolean value indicating whether the server is a backup server
downstart	The time (in milliseconds since Epoch) when the server became “unavail” or “unhealthy”
downtime	Total time the server was in the “unavail” and “unhealthy” states
fails	The total number of unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the server
keepalive	The current number of idle keepalive connections
received	The total number of bytes received from this server
requests	The total number of client requests forwarded to this server
sent	The total number of bytes sent to this server
state	urrent state, which may be one of “up”, “down”, “unavail”, or “unhealthy”.
unavail	Times the server became unavailable
weight	Weight of the server
responses/total	The total number of responses obtained from this server
responses/ 1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx	The number of responses with status codes 1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx
health_checks/checks	The total number of health check requests made
health_checks/fails	The number of failed health checks
health_checks/unhealthy	How many times the server became unhealthy (state “unhealthy”)
health_checks/last_passed	Boolean indicating if the last health check request was successful and passed tests

Connections

Metric Name	Description
accepted	The total number of accepted client connections
dropped	The total number of dropped client connections
active	The current number of active client connections
idle	The current number of idle client connections

Caches

Metric Name	Description
size	The current size of the cache
max_size	The limit on the maximum size of the cache specified in the configuration
cold	A boolean value indicating whether the “cache loader” process is still loading data from disk into the cache
hit, stale, updating, revalidated/responses	The total number of responses read from the cache
hit, stale, updating, revalidated/bytes	The total number of bytes read from the cache
miss, expired, bypass/responses	The total number of responses not taken from the cache
miss, expired, bypass/bytes	The total number of bytes read from the proxied server
miss, expired, bypass/responses_written	The total number of responses written to the cache
miss, expired, bypass/bytes_written	The total number of bytes written to the cache

Custom Dashboard

Contributing

Always feel free to fork and contribute any changes directly via GitHub.

Support

For any questions or feature request, please contact AppDynamics Center of Excellence.

Version:	1.1.3
Compatibility:	3.7
NGinx Version:	1.6.2, 1.9.9
Last Update:	26 Jul 2016

1.0.2 - Fixing code to show all metrics

1.1.0 - Added support for NGinx Plus

1.1.1 - Fixed an issue with connection leak

1.1.2 - Added support for NGinx data set version 6

1.1.3 - Added support for Content-Type with charset

Attachments:

NGinXMonitor-1.1.3.zip