New NGINX Plus Dashboard for Monitoring Available in R7

Original: https://www.nginx.com/blog/dashboard-r7/

The NGINX Plus live activity monitoring dashboard is completely redesigned in NGINX Plus Release 7 (R7). The new dashboard makes it even easier to identify and understand problems with your infrastructure and make rapid changes to your configuration. A new Dashboard overview tab provides an at‑a‑glance summary of the health of the system and the traffic going through it. From there you can drill down to more detailed information about virtual servers and backend servers. You can even make temporary changes to your load‑balancing configuration, such as adding, removing, and modifying backend servers, all from the dashboard.

Editor –

A live demo of the dashboard is available here. Read on for an overview of the new NGINX Plus dashboard.

The Dashboard Overview Tab

When you first open the dashboard, the overview Dashboard tab gives a complete, single‑page summary of NGINX Plus activity and of the health of your application servers.

The overview Dashboard tab on the NGINX Plus dashboard provides an at‑a‑glance summary of NGINX Plus activity and the health of your application server

On the Dashboard tab you can quickly learn:

New Tabbed Interface

The row of tabs at the top of the window make it easy to drill down to more detailed information about server zones, upstream groups, or the cache.

The row of tabs at the top of the window on the NGINX Plus dashboard make it easy to drill down to more detailed information about server zones, upstream groups, or the cache

The tabs have red, yellow, green indicators for quick and easy identification of health problems.

Server zones Tab

The Server zones tab gives detailed statistics on the frontend performance of NGINX Plus. Statistics are reported per HTTP virtual server as configured with the server directive in the http context. For NGINX Plus to collect information for a virtual server, you must include the status_zone directive in its configuration block.

The 'Server zones' tab in the NGINX Plus live activity monitoring dashboard displays information about NGINX Plus' interaction with clients

The Server zones tab provides the following information:

Upstreams Tab

The Upstreams tab provides information about each group configured with the upstream directive, which groups the backend servers to which NGINX Plus reverse proxies and load balances traffic. The Upstreams tab provides information about the upstream groups for HTTP and HTTPS traffic (TCP and UDP upstream groups appear on the TCP/UDP Upstreams tab).

The Upstreams tab on the NGINX Plus live activity monitoring dashboard provides information about the servers in each uptream group for HTTP/HTTPS traffic

The statistics on this tab are similar to those on the Server zones tab, the difference being which connections they are collected for. The Server zones tab reports statistics about connections between NGINX Plus and clients, whereas the Upstreams tab reports statistics about NGINX Plus talking to backend servers.

On this tab you can quickly find out which servers have failed as well as other valuable statistics:

To add, remove, or modify the servers in an upstream group, clicking the pencil icon next to its name. The Edit selected and Add server buttons appear and the icon switches to a white pencil on a dark background.

In editing mode on the 'Upstreams' tab in the NGINX Plus live activity monitoring dashboard, you can add, remove, or modify servers

Adding a Server

Click Add server to bring up the editing interface:

The 'Add server' interface for adding servers to an upstream group in the NGINX Plus live activity monitoring dashboard

Except for the Server address, the fields are optional and have default values. If you do not click a Set state radio button, Up is selected by default. For details on the configurable fields, see the documentation for the server directive.

Removing and Modifying Servers

To remove or modify servers, click the box to the left of each server’s name, then click Edit selected to bring up the editing interface:

The 'Edit selected' interface for modifying or removing servers in an upstream group in the NGINX Plus live activity monitoring dashboard

The boxes correspond to parameters to the server directive; click the Save button to save any changes you make. To remove a server altogether, click the Remove button.

Note: In NGINX Plus R8 and later, you can configure NGINX Plus so that changes made using the dashboard persist across restarts and configuration reloads. In releases prior to NGINX Plus R8, you must duplicate the changes in the NGINX Plus configuration file to make them permanent.

Caches Tab

The Caches tab provides statistics about the caches configured in NGINX Plus.

The 'Caches' tab in the NGINX Plus live activity monitoring dashboard provides information about cache readiness, fullness, and hit ratio

The following information is provided:

And Much More

There is a lot to more to explore on the NGINX Plus dashboard:

Try out the live activity monitoring dashboard in your environment – start your free 30‑day trial today or contact us for a live demo.

Retrieved by Nick Shadrin from nginx.com website.