Use Prometheus Monitoring to monitor NGINX exporters (later version) - Prometheus Service| Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

Alibaba Cloud Prometheus Monitoring allows you to install and configure NGINX exporters, and provides out-of-the-box dashboards. This topic describes how to install and configure NGINX exporters of the new version.

Prerequisites

You have installed and run the NGINX service.

Background information

The NGINX status monitoring module ngx_http_stub_status_module collects statistics for the number of requests received and handled by the NGINX service.
The ngx_http_stub_status_module module is installed for the NGINX exporters of the later version.

The following table lists the metrics of NGINX exporters of the later version.


Metric	Description
nginx_connections_accepted	The number of accepted client connections.
nginx_connections_active	The number of current client connections.
nginx_connections_handled	The number of handled client connections.
nginx_connections_reading	The number of read client connections.
nginx_connections_waiting	The number of waiting client connections.
nginx_connections_writing	The number of write-back client connections.
nginx_http_requests_total	The total number of client requests.
nginx_up	Specifies whether an NGINX exporter runs properly
nginxexporter_build_info	The build information of the NGINX exporter.

Step 1: Install the ngx_http_stub_status_module module

If the NGINX service is running on an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance, perform the following steps to install an NGINX exporter:

Check whether the ngx_http_stub_status_module module is installed.
```
nginx -V 2>&1 | grep -o with-http_stub_status_module
```
- A similar output indicates that the ngx_http_stub_status_module module is installed.
- If the preceding information does not appear, the ngx_http_stub_status_module module is not installed. Run the following commands to install the module:
```
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.13.12.tar.gz
tar xfz nginx-1.13.12.tar.gz
cd nginx-1.13.12/
./configure --with-http_stub_status_module
make
make install
```
Start the ngx_http_stub_status_module module to query the NGINX status.
```
location /nginx_status {
  stub_status on;
  allow 127.0.0.1;  #only allow requests from localhost
  deny all;   #deny all other hosts 
 }
```
Note
- The value of location must be nginx_status.
- allow 127.0.0.1 and deny all allow only local access. To allow NGINX exporter access, comment out these two lines of code, or change 127.0.0.1 to the IP address of the NGINX exporter.
Restart NGINX.
```
nginx -t
nginx -s reload 
```
Optional:Check whether the ngx_http_stub_status_module module is started.
```
curl http://127.0.0.1/nginx_status
```
A similar output indicates that the ngx_http_stub_status_module module is started.

Step 2: Install an NGINX exporter of the later version

Log on to the ARMS console.
In the left-side navigation pane, click Prometheus Monitoring.
In the upper-left corner, select the target region and click the name of the target Kubernetes cluster.
In the left-side navigation pane, click Exporter access .
On the Exporter access page, click add Exporter in the upper-right corner.
In the search box in the upper-right corner of the Exporter list dialog box, enter an Exporter name and click the target Exporter icon.

In the Nginx(V2) Exporter configuration dialog box, configure the required parameters on the Configuration tab. Click OK.


Parameter	Description
Exporter name	The name of the exporter. The name must meet the following requirements: It can contain only lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens (-), and cannot start or end with a hyphen (-). It must be unique. If you do not specify this parameter, the system uses the default name that consists of the exporter type and a numeric suffix.
Nginx(v2) Address	The URL that is used to access the NGINX server.
Nginx(v2) Port	The port number of the NGINX server. Example: 80.

On the Exporters page, click the DASHBOARD link in the dashboard column to view the Prometheus dashboard.
Optional: On the Exporters page, you can perform the following operations on the added Exporter:
- Click Delete in the Actions column to delete the Exporter.
- Click Log in the Actions column to view the operational logs of the Exporter.
- Click Details in the Actions column to view the Exporter details, including the environment variables and description of the Exporter.