Other Metrics

Learn about other metrics used by NGINX Amplify

Note:
Monitoring PHP-FPM and MySQL metrics is only supported by F5 NGINX Amplify Agent.

PHP-FPM metrics

You can also monitor your PHP-FPM applications with NGINX Amplify. NGINX Amplify Agent should run in the same process environment as PHP-FPM, and be able to find the php-fpm processes with ps(1), otherwise, the PHP-FPM metric collection won’t work.

When NGINX Amplify Agent finds a PHP-FPM master process, it tries to auto-detect the path to the PHP-FPM configuration. When the PHP-FPM configuration is found, NGINX Amplify Agent will look up the pool definitions and the corresponding pm.status_path directives.

NGINX Amplify Agent will find all pools and status URIs currently configured. NGINX Amplify Agent then queries the PHP-FPM pool status(es) via FastCGI. There’s no need to define HTTP proxy in your NGINX configuration that will point to the PHP-FPM status URIs.

To start monitoring PHP-FPM, follow the steps below:

Make sure that your PHP-FPM status is enabled for at least one pool — if it’s not, uncomment the pm.status_path directive for the pool. For PHP7 on Ubuntu, look inside the /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d directory to find the pool configuration files. After you’ve uncommented the pm.status_path, please make sure to restart PHP-FPM.
```
service php7.0-fpm restart
```
Important:
Check that NGINX, NGINX Amplify Agent, and the PHP-FPM workers are all run under the same user ID (e.g. www-data). You may have to change the used ID for the nginx workers, fix the nginx directories permissions, and then restart NGINX Amplify Agent too. If there are multiple PHP-FPM pools configured with different user IDs, make sure NGINX Amplify Agent’s user ID is included in the group IDs of the PHP-FPM workers. This is required in order for NGINX Amplify Agent to access the PHP-FPM pool socket when querying for metrics.
Confirm that the listen socket for the PHP-FPM pool you want to monitor and for which you enabled pm.status_path, is correctly configured with listen.owner and listen.group. Look for the following directives inside the pool configuration file.
```
listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data
listen.mode = 0660
```

Confirm that the PHP-FPM listen socket for the pool exists and has the right permissions.

ls -la /var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock
srw-rw---- 1 www-data www-data 0 May 18 14:02 /var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock

Confirm that you can query the PHP-FPM status for the pool from the command line:

# SCRIPT_NAME=/status SCRIPT_FILENAME=/status QUERY_STRING= REQUEST_METHOD=GET cgi-fcgi -bind -connect /var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock

Confirm that the command above returns a valid set of PHP-FPM metrics.

Note. The cgi-fcgi tool has to be installed separately, usually from the libfcgi-dev package. This tool is not required for NGINX Amplify Agent to collect and report PHP-FPM metrics, however it can be used to quickly diagnose possible issues with PHP-FPM metric collection.

If your PHP-FPM is configured to use a TCP socket instead of a Unix domain socket, make sure you can query the PHP-FPM metrics manually with cgi-fcgi. Double check that your TCP socket configuration is secure (ideally, PHP-FPM pool listening on 127.0.0.1, and listen.allowed_clients enabled as well).
Update NGINX Amplify Agent to the most recent version.
Make sure that the following options are set in /etc/amplify-agent/agent.conf
```
[extensions]
phpfpm = True
```
Restart NGINX Amplify Agent.
```
service amplify-agent restart
```

NGINX Amplify Agent should be able to detect the PHP-FPM master and workers, obtain the access to status, and collect the necessary metrics.

With all of the above successfully configured, the result should be an additional tab displayed on the Graphs page, with the pre-defined visualization of the PHP-FPM metrics.

The PHP-FPM metrics on the Graphs) page are cumulative, across all automatically detected pools. If you need per-pool graphs, go to Dashboards and create custom graphs per pool.

Here is the list of caveats to look for if the PHP-FPM metrics are not being collected:

No status enabled for any of the pools.
Different user IDs used by NGINX Amplify Agent and the PHP-FPM workers, or lack of a single group (when using PHP-FPM with a Unix domain socket).
Wrong permissions configured for the PHP-FPM listen socket (when using PHP-FPM with a Unix domain socket).
Agent can’t connect to the TCP socket (when using PHP-FPM with a TCP socket).
Agent can’t parse the PHP-FPM configuration. A possible workaround is to not have any ungrouped directives. Try to move any ungrouped directives under [global] and pool section headers.

If checking the above issues didn’t help, please enable NGINX Amplify Agent’s debug log, restart NGINX Amplify Agent, wait a few minutes, and then please submit a support request through https://my.f5.com/, please attach the debug log to the support case.

Below is the list of supported PHP-FPM metrics.

php.fpm.conn.accepted

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of requests accepted by the pool.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (accepted conn)

php.fpm.queue.current

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The number of requests in the queue of pending connections.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (listen queue)

php.fpm.queue.max

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The maximum number of requests in the queue of pending connections since FPM has started.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (max listen queue)

php.fpm.queue.len

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The size of the socket queue of pending connections.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (listen queue len)

php.fpm.proc.idle

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The number of idle processes.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (idle processes)

php.fpm.proc.active

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The number of active processes.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (active processes)

php.fpm.proc.total

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The number of idle + active processes.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (total processes)

php.fpm.proc.max_active

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The maximum number of active processes since FPM has started.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (max active processes)

php.fpm.proc.max_child

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The number of times, the process limit has been reached.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (max children reached)

php.fpm.slow_req

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of requests that exceeded request_slowlog_timeout value.
Source:      PHP-FPM status (slow requests)

MySQL metrics

Version 1.1.0 and above of NGINX Amplify Agent has a plugin for monitoring MySQL databases. Again, NGINX Amplify Agent should run in the same process environment as MySQL, and be able to find the mysqld processes with ps(1). Otherwise, the MySQL metric collection won’t work.

NGINX Amplify Agent doesn’t try to find and parse any existing MySQL configuration files. In order for NGINX Amplify Agent to connect to MySQL and collect the metrics, the following steps need to be performed.

To start monitoring MySQL, follow the instructions below.

Create a new user for NGINX Amplify Agent.

$ mysql -u root -p
[..]
mysql> CREATE USER 'amplify-agent'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'xxxxxx';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

Check that the user can read MySQL metrics.

$ mysql -u amplify-agent -p
..
mysql> show global status;
+-----------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Variable_name                                 | Value                                            |
+-----------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Aborted_clients                               | 0                                                |
..
| Uptime_since_flush_status                     | 1993                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
353 rows in set (0.01 sec)

Note:
NGINX Amplify Agent doesn’t use mysql(1) for metric collection, however it implements a similar query mechanism via a Python module.

Update NGINX Amplify Agent to the most recent version.

Add the following to /etc/amplify-agent/agent.conf

[extensions]
..
mysql = True

[mysql]
#host =
#port =
unix_socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
user = amplify-agent
password = xxxxxx

where the password option mirrors the password from step 1 above.

Restart NGINX Amplify Agent.
```
# service amplify-agent restart
```

With the above configuration steps NGINX Amplify Agent should be able to detect the MySQL master, obtain the access to status, and collect the necessary metrics. The end result should be an additional tab displayed on the Graphs) page, with the pre-defined visualization of the key MySQL metrics.

If the above didn’t work, please enable NGINX Amplify Agent’s debug log, restart NGINX Amplify Agent, wait a few minutes, and then create a support request through https://my.f5.com/, please attach the debug log to the support case.

NGINX Amplify Agent retrieves most of the metrics from the MySQL global status variables.

Below is the list of supported MySQL metrics.

mysql.global.connections

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of connection attempts (successful or not) to the MySQL server.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Connections";

mysql.global.questions

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of statements executed by the server. See MySQL reference manual for details.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Questions";

mysql.global.select

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of times a select statement has been executed.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Com_select";

mysql.global.insert

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of times an insert statement has been executed.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Com_insert";

mysql.global.update

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of times an update statement has been executed.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Com_update";

mysql.global.delete

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of times a delete statement has been executed.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Com_delete";

mysql.global.writes

Type:        counter, integer
Description: Sum of insert, update, and delete counters above.

mysql.global.commit

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of times a commit statement has been executed.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Com_commit";

mysql.global.slow_queries

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of queries that have taken more than long_query_time seconds.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Slow_queries";

mysql.global.uptime

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of seconds that the server has been up.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Uptime";

mysql.global.aborted_connects

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of failed attempts to connect to the MySQL server.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Aborted_connects";

mysql.global.innodb_buffer_pool_read_requests

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of logical read requests.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Innodb_buffer_pool_read_requests";

mysql.global.innodb_buffer_pool_reads

Type:        counter, integer
Description: The number of logical reads that InnoDB could not satisfy from the buffer
             pool, and had to read directly from disk.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Innodb_buffer_pool_reads";

mysql.global.innodb_buffer_pool.hit_ratio

Type:        gauge, percentage
Description: Hit ratio reflecting the efficiency of the InnoDB buffer pool.

mysql.global.innodb_buffer_pool_pages_total

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The total size of the InnoDB buffer pool, in pages.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Innodb_buffer_pool_pages_total";

mysql.global.innodb_buffer_pool_pages_free

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The number of free pages in the InnoDB buffer pool.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Innodb_buffer_pool_pages_free";

mysql.global.innodb_buffer_pool_util

Type:        gauge, percentage
Description: InnoDB buffer pool utilization.

mysql.global.threads_connected

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The number of currently open connections.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Threads_connected";

mysql.global.threads_running

Type:        gauge, integer
Description: The number of threads that are not sleeping.
Source:      SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "Threads_running";