NGINX is a wildly popular webserver and reverse proxy. But NGINX, for all of its great features, can get into trouble if left alone too long.

Let's take a look at some of the basic metrics to monitor within NGINX and what they can indicate. A layered approach to monitoring, starting from the application layer and moving down through process, server, hosting provider, external services, and user activity. By monitoring these metrics, you’ll get coverage for both active and incipient problems with NGINX.

We will also dig into how OpenTelemetry tracing using the OTel module for NGINX can aid your understanding of NGINX behavior.