NGINX 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector uses the Smart Agent receiver with the nginx monitor type to retrieve metrics from NGINX instances.

This integration is available on Linux and Windows.

Note

To monitor NGINX instances with the OpenTelemetry Collector using native OpenTelemetry refer to the NGINX receiver component.

Benefits 🔗

After you configure the integration, you can access these features:

View metrics. You can create your own custom dashboards, and most monitors provide built-in dashboards as well. For information about dashboards, see View dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud.
View a data-driven visualization of the physical servers, virtual machines, AWS instances, and other resources in your environment that are visible to Infrastructure Monitoring. For information about navigators, see Use navigators in Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring.
Access the Metric Finder and search for metrics sent by the monitor. For information, see Search the Metric Finder and Metadata Catalog.

Installation 🔗

Follow these steps to deploy this integration:

Deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to your host or container platform:
- Install on Kubernetes
- Install on Linux
Configure the monitor, as described in the Configuration section.
Restart the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.

Configuration 🔗

To use this integration of a Smart Agent monitor with the Collector:

Include the Smart Agent receiver in your configuration file.
Add the monitor type to the Collector configuration, both in the receiver and pipelines sections.

See how to Use Smart Agent monitors with the Collector.
See how to set up the Smart Agent receiver.
For a list of common configuration options, refer to Common configuration settings for monitors.
Learn more about the Collector at Get started: Understand and use the Collector.

Example 🔗

To activate this integration, add the following to your Collector configuration:

receivers:
  smartagent/nginx:
    type: collectd/nginx
    host: <host>
    port: <port>
    ...  # Additional config

Next, add the monitor to the service.pipelines.metrics.receivers section of your configuration file:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/nginx]

Configuration settings 🔗

The following table shows the configuration options for this monitor:

Option	Required	Type	Description
`host`	Yes	`string`	Hostname or IP address of the NGINX instance. For example, `127.0.0.1`.
`port`	Yes	`integer`	The port of the NGINX instance. For example, `8080`.
`name`	no	`string`	Name of the NGINX instance.
`url`	no	`string`	URL of the status endpoint. The default value is `http://{{.Host}}:{{.Port}}/nginx_status`, which takes the values defined in `host` and `port`.
`username`	no	`string`	Username for HTTP basic authentication, if needed.
`password`	no	`string`	Password for HTTP basic authentication, if needed.
`timeout`	no	`integer`	Timeout in seconds for the request. The default value is `0`.

Nginx configuration 🔗

You can configure NGINX to expose status information by editing the NGINX configuration. See ngx_http_stub_status_module on the NGINX documentation site.

After you’ve set up the Collector, follow these steps to configure the Nginx web server to expose status metrics:

Add the following configuration to your Nginx server. The default nginx server configuration is at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default.

server {
  location /nginx_status {
    stub_status on;
    access_log off;
    allow 127.0.0.1; # The source IP address of OpenTelemetry Collector.
    deny all;
  }
}

Restart the Nginx web server.

Metrics 🔗

The following metrics are available for this integration:

Name	Description	Category	Type
`connections.accepted`	Connections accepted by NGINX Web Server	Default	cumulative
`connections.handled`	Connections handled by NGINX Web Server	Default	cumulative
`connections.failed`	Connections failed by the NGINX Web Server	Custom	cumulative
`nginx_connections.active`	Connections active in NGINX Web Server	Default	gauge
`nginx_connections.reading`	Connections being read by NGINX Web Server	Default	gauge
`nginx_connections.waiting`	Connections waited on by NGINX Web Server	Default	gauge
`nginx_connections.writing`	Connections being written by NGINX Web Server	Default	gauge
`nginx_requests`	Requests handled by NGINX Web Server	Default	cumulative

Notes 🔗

To learn more about the available in Splunk Observability Cloud see Metric types
In host-based subscription plans, default metrics are those metrics included in host-based subscriptions in Splunk Observability Cloud, such as host, container, or bundled metrics. Custom metrics are not provided by default and might be subject to charges. See Metric categories for more information.
In MTS-based subscription plans, all metrics are custom.
To add additional metrics, see how to configure extraMetrics in Add additional metrics

Troubleshooting 🔗

If you are a Splunk Observability Cloud customer and are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, you can get help in the following ways.

Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers

Submit a case in the Splunk Support Portal .
Contact Splunk Support .

Available to prospective customers and free trial users

Ask a question and get answers through community support at Splunk Answers .
Join the Splunk #observability user group Slack channel to communicate with customers, partners, and Splunk employees worldwide. To join, see Chat groups in the Get Started with Splunk Community manual.

This page was last updated on Feb 11, 2025.

Related Topics