End of Sale Notice:

F5 NGINX is announcing the End of Sale (EoS) for NGINX Controller API Management Module, effective January 1, 2024.

F5 maintains generous lifecycle policies that allow customers to continue support and receive product updates. Existing NGINX Controller API- Management customers can continue to use the product past the EoS date. License renewals are not available after September 30, 2024.

See our End of Sale announcement for more details.

End of Sale Notice:

F5 NGINX is announcing the End of Sale (EoS) for NGINX Controller Application Delivery Module, effective January 1, 2024.

F5 maintains generous lifecycle policies that allow customers to continue support and receive product updates. Existing NGINX Controller Application Delivery customers can continue to use the product past the EoS date. License renewals are not available after September 30, 2024.

See our End of Sale announcement for more details.

Get to Know the F5 NGINX Controller Agent

Learn about the NGINX Controller Agent.

Overview

The F5 NGINX Controller Agent is a compact application written in Golang. NGINX Controller uses the Controller Agent to manage and monitor each NGINX Plus instance that the Agent is installed on. Once installed, the NGINX Controller Agent collects metrics and metadata and sends them securely to NGINX Controller for storage and visualization.

How NGINX Controller Agent Works

You need to install the NGINX Controller Agent on all of the hosts you’d like to monitor.

Once installed, the NGINX Controller Agent automatically starts to report metrics. You should see the real-time metrics data in the NGINX Controller user interface after about one minute.

There’s no need to manually add or configure anything in the NGINX Controller user interface after installing the Agent. When the Agent is started, the metrics and the metadata are automatically reported to NGINX Controller and are visualized in the user interface. You can, however, configure the NGINX Controller Agent to customize how it collects and reports metrics.

All communications between the NGINX Controller Agent and the backend are done securely over SSL/TLS. All traffic is always initiated by the NGINX Controller Agent. The backend system doesn’t set up any connections back to the NGINX Controller Agent.

Detecting and Monitoring NGINX Instances

The NGINX Controller Agent attempts to detect and monitor all unique NGINX process instances running on a host and collects a separate set of metrics and metadata for each. The Agent uses the following qualifications to identify unique NGINX instances:

• A unique control process and its workers, started with an absolute path to a distinct NGINX binary.
• A control process running with a default config path, or with a custom path set in the command-line parameters.

Caution:
You should not make manual changes to the nginx.conf file on NGINX Plus instances that are managed by NGINX Controller. Manually updating the nginx.conf file on managed instances may adversely affect system performance. In most cases, NGINX Controller will revert or overwrite manual updates made to nginx.conf.

Supported Systems

NGINX Controller, the NGINX Controller Agent, and the NGINX Controller Application Security Add-on support the following distributions and architectures.

See Also:
Refer to the NGINX Plus Technical Specifications guide for the distributions that NGINX Plus supports.

Analytics, Visibility, and Reporting Daemon (AVRD)

NGINX Controller v3.1 and later use an Analytics, Visibility, and Reporting daemon (AVRD) to aggregate and report app-centric metrics, which you can use to track and check the health of your apps. To learn more about these metrics, see the NGINX Metrics Catalog topic.

See Also:
See the NGINX Controller Technical Specifications for the complete list of system requirements for NGINX Controller and the NGINX Controller Agent.

Supported Python Versions

NGINX Controller and the NGINX Controller Agent versions 3.6 and earlier require Python 2.6 or 2.7. Python is not needed for NGINX Controller or the NGINX Controller Agent versions 3.7 and later.

What’s Next

• Install the NGINX Controller Agent
• Customize how the NGINX Controller Agent collects metrics