Monitoring Nginx with Prometheus: Configuration, Exporter Installation, and Dashboard Setup

Nginx is a high‑performance web server widely used in many applications, and monitoring its health is essential for reliable operation.

1. Configure Nginx – Enable the stub_status module by adding a location block to the Nginx configuration:

location /stub_status { stub_status; access_log off; }

After editing the config, reload Nginx to apply the changes:

$ sudo nginx -t $ sudo nginx -s reload

2. Install Nginx Prometheus Exporter – Download the exporter binary, extract it, and start it with the address of the stub_status endpoint:

$ wget https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-prometheus-exporter/releases/download/v0.11.0/nginx-prometheus-exporter_0.11.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz $ mkdir nginx-prometheus-exporter $ tar -zxvf nginx-prometheus-exporter_0.11.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz -C nginx-prometheus-exporter $ cd nginx-prometheus-exporter $ ./nginx-prometheus-exporter -nginx.scrape-uri=http://192.168.214.100:80/stub_status

3. Configure Prometheus – Add a scrape job for the exporter in prometheus.yml :

scrape_configs: - job_name: 'nginx' scrape_interval: 10s static_configs: - targets: ['localhost:9113']

Restart Prometheus to load the new configuration:

$ prometheus --config.file /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml &

After a short wait, the Nginx metrics (e.g., nginx_connections_active , nginx_http_requests_total , nginx_up ) become visible in the Prometheus web UI.

4. Visualize with Grafana – Connect Grafana to Prometheus, create dashboards, and display the collected Nginx metrics for real‑time monitoring.