[NGINX] Monitoring Nginx using Netdata

Recently I saw this tutorial about monitoring Nginx with Netdata and tried it by myself. I have running Netdata on my Proxmox Host and Nginx inside LXC. So I could skip step 1 and 2 of the tutorial. Since I’m using the super simple nginx-proxy-manager, which comes as docker deployment, it took me some minutes to figure out, how to enable the Nginx ‘stub_status‘ module (which is step 3 of the tutorial). Here’s what I did.

SSH into the LXC where the Nginx Docker is running. Look up the nginx container name (root_app_1) and open a shell in the running container.

docker ps
docker exec -it root_app_1 /bin/bash

Check if the ‘stub_module‘ is already enabled. The following command should return: with-https_stub_status_module
I got it from here.

nginx -V 2>&1 | grep -o with-https_stub_status_module

Next add a location to the nginx ‘server {}‘ block in the default config, to make it reachable via Netdata. The tutorial goes to ‘/etc/nginx/sites-available/default‘, another tutorial is editing ‘/etc/nginx/nginx.conf‘, but I found the default config in ‘/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf’.

nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

If nano is not installed (bash: nano: command not found), just install it. Get more information here or here.

apt update 
apt install nano -y

Insert the new location in the server { listen 80; …..} block. In my case I have running Netdata on my Proxmox host, so i added localhost and my Proxmox ip.

  location /nginx_status {
	stub_status;
	allow 192.168.178.100; #only allow requests from pve
	allow 127.0.0.1;	  #only allow requests from localhost
	deny all;		  #deny all other hosts	
  }

Save, exit your docker container and restart it.

docker restart root_app_1

SSH into Proxmox and check with curl, if you able to reach the new nginx location.

For the last step Configure Netdata to Monitor Nginx (step 4) , just follow the Netdata Wiki. Place a new file called nginx.conf on your Netdata host.

nano /etc/netdata/python.d/nginx.conf

Because Netdata is not running local, use ‘remote‘ following the url, instead of local and localhost.

update_every : 10
priority     : 90100

remote:
  url     : 'https://192.168.178.197/nginx_status'

Restart Netdata and your are done.

sudo systemctl restart netdata

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