How to Monitor Nginx Web Server

Overview

The Nginx integration lets you monitor your Nginx web server performance in real time using the stub_status module. Xitoring collects connection states, request rates, and throughput metrics — giving you deep visibility into how Nginx handles traffic on your servers.

What Can It Monitor?

The Nginx integration tracks the following metrics:

Active Connections — Number of currently active client connections, including waiting
Accepted Connections — Total accepted client connections since server start
Handled Connections — Total handled connections (equals accepts unless resource limits are hit)
Reading — Connections where Nginx is reading the request header
Writing — Connections where Nginx is writing the response back to the client
Waiting — Keep-alive connections waiting for the next request
Requests per Second — Rate of incoming requests
Connections per Second — Rate of new connections being accepted

Prerequisites

You need to ensure that the stub_status module is available in your Nginx installation.

On Linux

Check for the module:

nginx -V 2>&1 | grep -o http_stub_status_module

On Windows

Navigate to your Nginx directory (typically C:\nginx) and run:

nginx -V 2>&1 | findstr /C:"http_stub_status_module"

Configure Nginx

Add the following location block to your Nginx server configuration:

location /nginx-status {
    stub_status;
    access_log off;
    server_tokens on;
    allow 127.0.0.1;
    deny all;
}

This serves statistics at http://127.0.0.1/nginx-status only on localhost, keeping them secure from public access.

Reload Nginx after making changes:

sudo nginx -s reload

How to Activate the Integration

Once stub_status is configured, activate the integration via the Xitogent CLI:

xitogent integrate

Select Nginx from the list of available integrations. When prompted, enter the URL where Nginx serves its status page:

http://127.0.0.1/nginx-status

If successful, you'll see:

connection established
integration setup was successful and the config file updated

The config file is created at /etc/xitogent/integrations/nginx_integration.conf.

Setting Up Triggers

You can create triggers for the following parameters to get incidents when values exceed or drop below your thresholds:

Active Connections
Accepted Connections
Handled Connections
Reading / Writing / Waiting
Requests per Second

Navigate to Triggers on your server page, select Nginx as the integration, choose a metric, set the threshold value, and configure notifications.

Tips

Always restrict the status endpoint to 127.0.0.1 for security
Monitor Active Connections to detect traffic surges early
Watch the gap between Accepted and Handled — a growing difference indicates resource exhaustion
Use Waiting connection alerts to identify slow backends or keep-alive issues
Works on both Linux and Windows servers