Nginx Real Time Metrics

To get a better idea of how my server for Weather was handling request, I needed a way to get some insights into nginx. I wanted to calculate request per second and routes being accessed. I came across a great tool call ngxtop, a real-time metrics for nginx server. After a few commands ngxtop was up and running on my Digital Ocean Forge server.

1. Install ngxtop

   pip install ngxtop

2. On my forge server, I had to add ngxtop to my path

   sudo nano ~/.bash_profile

3. Then type and use ctrl +x to save

   export PATH=$PATH:./.local/bin/

4. Reload bash profile

   source ~/.bash_profile

5. Finally I had to edit my Nginx Config on Forge and removed this line and restarted nginx

   # access_log off

Some useful commands

• Run ngxtop

  ngxtop

• View top source IPs of clients

  ngxtop top remote_addr

• View 404 status codes

  ngxtop -i 'status == 404'

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Also published on Medium.