dev@cloudburo | DevOp Notes: Monitoring Nginx and its underlying Web Components

DevOp Notes: Monitoring Nginx and its underlying Web Components

Posted on 01.Sep 2018 | Tags quicktips cloud

Under the acronym “DevOps Notes” I publish my technical findings, which were gathered during the bootstrapping phase of my first cloud based side-project, the so-called “ Cloudburo Publishing Bot”.

“The Cloudburo Publishing Bot Platform enables Micropreneurs, Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), as well as enthusiastic blogging hobbyists to establish a Content Marketing Presence with minimal effort which is centered around Evernote.”

You can find a description of the Evernote based blogging solution in the following Medium Article:

How to Manage an Online or News Blog directly out of Evernote.

So let’s move on to the tech note:

An essential component within the Publishing Bot platform is “ nginx”, the well-known high performance Webserver.

The main task of the Publishing Bot is to extract a user’s Evernote Blog Article and convert it into a static blog website (based on the brilliant static Website Framework MiddleMan).

Each blog site managed by the Publishing Bot will be automatically configured into the Nginx instance running on the Publishing Bot Instance.

Until recently I used a very basic monitoring of my docker instance until I got aware of Amplify, which offers a brilliant free monitoring solution ( https://amplify.nginx.com)

Amplify is a free, modern, low barrier monitoring tool. It comes directly from the company behind NGINX. With the focus on NGINX and the underlying web site components, Amplify will make your web site more reliable and predictable.

What you have to do, is to create an account at their site and follow the configuration steps instructions, which are straightforward.

For example do enable the monitoring in my Publishing Bot Docker instance (with its configured nginx instance), the only thing I had to do, is to add the following line to the Dockerfile:


  # Install Nginx Amplify Monitor 
  RUN curl -L -O https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent/raw/master/packages/install.sh \ 
      && API_KEY=‘xxxx15x0e610xxxxaa80axxead' sh ./install.sh 
  ADD nginx-conf /etc/nginx/conf.d

The ADD command will copy the following file into the conf.d directory


  server { 
      listen 127.0.0.1:80; 
      server_name 127.0.0.1; 
      location /nginx_status { 
          stub_status on; 
          allow 127.0.0.1; 
          deny all; 
      } 
  }

Within minutes the Amplify Dashboard gets filled with useful monitoring data.

Some examples:

Main Dashboard