How to monitor Nginx on Kubernetes

The blog post explores methods to effectively monitor Nginx when deployed on Kubernetes, emphasizing the importance of understanding key metrics and configuring dashboards for optimal performance insights. Nginx, renowned for its speed and resource efficiency, is widely used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and web cache in cloud environments. Monitoring involves enabling the stub_status module to expose performance metrics, and using tools like Sysdig Monitor, which offers advanced features such as leveraging Kubernetes metadata for detailed segmentation by namespaces, services, and pods. Sysdig provides visibility into Nginx's application layer metrics without code instrumentation, offering insights into HTTP methods, response codes, and request times. The article also touches on Nginx Plus, the commercial version, which offers additional enterprise features and metrics. It concludes by highlighting Nginx's critical role in cloud infrastructure, underscoring its utility in analyzing service responsiveness and predicting backend issues.