NGINX Prometheus Exporter

NGINX Prometheus exporter makes it possible to monitor NGINX or NGINX Plus using Prometheus.

Overview

NGINX exposes a handful of metrics via the stub_status page. NGINX Plus provides a richer set of metrics via the API and the monitoring dashboard. NGINX Prometheus exporter fetches the metrics from a single NGINX or NGINX Plus, converts the metrics into appropriate Prometheus metrics types and finally exposes them via an HTTP server to be collected by Prometheus.

Getting Started

In this section, we show how to quickly run NGINX Prometheus Exporter for NGINX or NGINX Plus.

A Note about NGINX Ingress Controller

If you’d like to use the NGINX Prometheus Exporter with NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes, see this doc for the installation instructions.

Prerequisites

We assume that you have already installed Prometheus and NGINX or NGINX Plus. Additionally, you need to:

• Expose the built-in metrics in NGINX/NGINX Plus:
  • For NGINX, expose the stub_status page at /stub_status on port 8080.
  • For NGINX Plus, expose the API at /api on port 8080.
• Configure Prometheus to scrape metrics from the server with the exporter. Note that the default scrape port of the exporter is 9113 and the default metrics path -- /metrics.

Running the Exporter in a Docker Container

To start the exporter we use the docker run command.

• To export NGINX metrics, run:

  $ docker run -p 9113:9113 nginx/nginx-prometheus-exporter:0.10.0 -nginx.scrape-uri=http://<nginx>:8080/stub_status
  

  where <nginx> is the IP address/DNS name, through which NGINX is available.

• To export NGINX Plus metrics, run:

  $ docker run -p 9113:9113 nginx/nginx-prometheus-exporter:0.10.0 -nginx.plus -nginx.scrape-uri=http://<nginx-plus>:8080/api
  

  where <nginx-plus> is the IP address/DNS name, through which NGINX Plus is available.

Running the Exporter Binary

• To export NGINX metrics, run:

  $ nginx-prometheus-exporter -nginx.scrape-uri=http://<nginx>:8080/stub_status
  

  where <nginx> is the IP address/DNS name, through which NGINX is available.

• To export NGINX Plus metrics:

  $ nginx-prometheus-exporter -nginx.plus -nginx.scrape-uri=http://<nginx-plus>:8080/api
  

  where <nginx-plus> is the IP address/DNS name, through which NGINX Plus is available.

• To export and scrape NGINX metrics with unix domain sockets, run:

  $ nginx-prometheus-exporter -nginx.scrape-uri=unix:<nginx>:/stub_status -web.listen-address=unix:/path/to/socket.sock
  

  where <nginx> is the path to unix domain socket, through which NGINX stub status is available.

Note. The nginx-prometheus-exporter is not a daemon. To run the exporter as a system service (daemon), configure the init system of your Linux server (such as systemd or Upstart) accordingly. Alternatively, you can run the exporter in a Docker container.

Usage

Command-line Arguments

Usage of ./nginx-prometheus-exporter:
  -nginx.plus
        Start the exporter for NGINX Plus. By default, the exporter is started for NGINX. The default value can be overwritten by NGINX_PLUS environment variable.
  -nginx.retries int
        A number of retries the exporter will make on start to connect to the NGINX stub_status page/NGINX Plus API before exiting with an error. The default value can be overwritten by NGINX_RETRIES environment variable.
  -nginx.retry-interval duration
        An interval between retries to connect to the NGINX stub_status page/NGINX Plus API on start. The default value can be overwritten by NGINX_RETRY_INTERVAL environment variable. (default 5s)
  -nginx.scrape-uri string
        A URI or unix domain socket path for scraping NGINX or NGINX Plus metrics.
        For NGINX, the stub_status page must be available through the URI. For NGINX Plus -- the API. The default value can be overwritten by SCRAPE_URI environment variable. (default "http://127.0.0.1:8080/stub_status")
  -nginx.ssl-ca-cert string
        Path to the PEM encoded CA certificate file used to validate the servers SSL certificate. The default value can be overwritten by SSL_CA_CERT environment variable.
  -nginx.ssl-client-cert string
        Path to the PEM encoded client certificate file to use when connecting to the server. The default value can be overwritten by SSL_CLIENT_CERT environment variable.
  -nginx.ssl-client-key string
        Path to the PEM encoded client certificate key file to use when connecting to the server. The default value can be overwritten by SSL_CLIENT_KEY environment variable.
  -nginx.ssl-verify
        Perform SSL certificate verification. The default value can be overwritten by SSL_VERIFY environment variable. (default true)
  -nginx.timeout duration
        A timeout for scraping metrics from NGINX or NGINX Plus. The default value can be overwritten by TIMEOUT environment variable. (default 5s)
  -prometheus.const-labels value
        A comma separated list of constant labels that will be used in every metric. Format is label1=value1,label2=value2... The default value can be overwritten by CONST_LABELS environment variable.
  -web.listen-address string
        An address or unix domain socket path to listen on for web interface and telemetry. The default value can be overwritten by LISTEN_ADDRESS environment variable. (default ":9113")
  -web.telemetry-path string
        A path under which to expose metrics. The default value can be overwritten by TELEMETRY_PATH environment variable. (default "/metrics")
  -web.secured-metrics
        Expose metrics using https. The default value can be overwritten by SECURED_METRICS variable.  (default false)
  -web.ssl-server-cert string
        Path to the PEM encoded certificate for the nginx-exporter metrics server(when web.secured-metrics=true). The default value can be overwritten by SSL_SERVER_CERT variable.
  -web.ssl-server-key string
        Path to the PEM encoded key for the nginx-exporter metrics server (when web.secured-metrics=true). The default value can be overwritten by SSL_SERVER_KEY variable.
  -version
        Display the NGINX exporter version. (default false)

Exported Metrics

Common metrics:

Metrics for NGINX OSS:

Stub status metrics

Metrics for NGINX Plus:

Connections

HTTP

SSL

HTTP Server Zones

Stream Server Zones

HTTP Upstreams

Note: for the state metric, the string values are converted to float64 using the following rule: "up" -> 1.0, "draining" -> 2.0, "down" -> 3.0, "unavail" –> 4.0, "checking" –> 5.0, "unhealthy" -> 6.0.

Stream Upstreams

Note: for the state metric, the string values are converted to float64 using the following rule: "up" -> 1.0, "down" -> 3.0, "unavail" –> 4.0, "checking" –> 5.0, "unhealthy" -> 6.0.

Stream Zone Sync

Location Zones

Resolver

HTTP Requests Rate Limiting

HTTP Connections Limiting

Stream Connections Limiting

Connect to the /metrics page of the running exporter to see the complete list of metrics along with their descriptions. Note: to see server zones related metrics you must configure status zones and to see upstream related metrics you must configure upstreams with a shared memory zone.

Troubleshooting

The exporter logs errors to the standard output. When using Docker, if the exporter doesn’t work as expected, check its logs using docker logs command.

Releases

Docker images

We publish the Docker image on DockerHub, GitHub Container, Amazon ECR Public Gallery and Quay.io.

As an alternative, you can choose the edge version built from the latest commit from the main branch. The edge version is useful for experimenting with new features that are not yet published in a stable release.

Binaries

We publish the binaries for multiple Operating Systems and architectures on the GitHub releases page.

Homebrew

You can add the NGINX homebrew tap with

$ brew tap nginxinc/tap

and then install the formula with

$ brew install nginx-prometheus-exporter

Building the Exporter

You can build the exporter using the provided Makefile. Before building the exporter, make sure the following software is installed on your machine:

• make
• git
• Docker for building the container image
• Go for building the binary

Building the Docker Image

To build the Docker image with the exporter, run:

$ make container

Note: go is not required, as the exporter binary is built in a Docker container. See the Dockerfile.

Building the Binary

To build the binary, run:

$ make

Note: the binary is built for the OS/arch of your machine. To build binaries for other platforms, see the Makefile.

The binary is built with the name nginx-prometheus-exporter.

Grafana Dashboard

The official Grafana dashboard is provided with the exporter for NGINX. Check the Grafana Dashboard documentation for more information.

SBOM (Software Bill of Materials)

We generate SBOMs for the binaries and the Docker image.

Binaries

The SBOMs for the binaries are available in the releases page. The SBOMs are generated using syft and are available in SPDX format.

Docker Image

The SBOM for the Docker image is available in the DockerHub, GitHub Container registry, Amazon ECR Public Gallery and Quay.io repositories. The SBOMs are generated using syft and stored as an attestation in the image manifest.

For example to retrieve the SBOM for linux/amd64 from Docker Hub and analyze it using grype you can run the following command:

$ docker buildx imagetools inspect nginx/nginx-prometheus-exporter:edge --format '{{ json (index .SBOM "linux/amd64").SPDX }}' | grype

Contacts

We’d like to hear your feedback! If you have any suggestions or experience issues with the NGINX Prometheus Exporter, please create an issue or send a pull request on GitHub. You can contact us directly via [email protected] or on the NGINX Community Slack in the #nginx-prometheus-exporter channel.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to the project, please read our Contributing guide.

Support

The commercial support is available for NGINX Plus customers when the NGINX Prometheus Exporter is used with NGINX Ingress Controller.

License

Apache License, Version 2.0.