Technical Specifications

Overview

NGINX Instance Manager provides centralized management for NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus instances across various environments, including bare metal, containers, public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), and virtual machines. It supports several Linux distributions, including Amazon Linux, CentOS, Debian, RHEL, and Ubuntu. This guide outlines the technical specifications, minimum requirements, and supported platforms for deploying NGINX Instance Manager, ensuring optimal performance in both small and large environments.

Supported deployment environments

You can deploy NGINX Instance Manager in the following environments:

• Bare metal
• Container
• Public cloud: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure
• Virtual machine

Supported Linux Distributions

The following table lists the Linux distributions supported by NGINX Instance Manager and NGINX App Protect:

Supported NGINX Versions

NGINX Instance Manager supports the following NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus versions:

Sizing recommendations

The following recommendations provide the minimum guidelines for NGINX Instance Manager. These guidelines ensure adequate performance, but for optimal results, we strongly recommend using solid-state drives (SSDs) for storage.

Standard NGINX configuration deployments

This section outlines the recommendations for NGINX Instance Manager deployments with data plane instances using standard configurations. Standard configurations typically support up to 40 upstream servers with associated location and server blocks, and up to 350 certificates. This is ideal for medium-sized environments or applications with moderate traffic.

We recommend using SSDs to enhance storage performance.

These values represent the minimum resources needed for deployments that fall under standard configurations.

Large NGINX configuration deployments

For environments requiring more resources, large configurations are suitable. These configurations can support up to 300 upstream servers and are designed for enterprise environments or applications handling high traffic and complex configurations.

Sizing benchmarks for storage

The following benchmarks focus on disk storage requirements for NGINX Instance Manager. Storage needs depend on the number of instances and data retention periods (in days). The benchmarks are divided into three configuration sizes:

• Small configuration: Typically supports about 15 servers, 50 locations, and 30 upstreams/backends. Each instance generates 3,439 metrics per minute.
• Medium configuration: Usually includes about 50 servers, 200 locations, and 200 upstreams/backends. Each instance generates 16,766 metrics per minute.
• Generic Large configuration: Handles up to 100 servers, 1,000 locations, and 900 upstreams/backends. In NGINX Plus, each instance generates 59,484 metrics per minute.

Storage requirements for NGINX Plus

The table below provides storage estimates for NGINX Plus based on configuration size, number of instances, and a 14-day data retention period. Larger configurations and longer retention periods will require proportionally more storage.

Note:
MiB (mebibyte), GiB (gibibyte), and TiB (tebibyte) are units of data storage. MiB equals 1,024^2 (2^20) bytes, GiB equals 1,024^3 (2^30) bytes, and TiB equals 1,024^4 (2^40) bytes. These are often used in computing to represent binary data storage capacities, as opposed to MB (megabyte), GB (gigabyte), and TB (terabyte), which use decimal units.

Storage requirements for NGINX OSS

NGINX OSS collects fewer metrics per instance compared to NGINX Plus. This is because NGINX OSS lacks the advanced features of NGINX Plus, such as the NGINX Plus API, which limits the amount of operational data collected and stored. For example, in the Generic Large configuration, NGINX OSS generates only 167 metrics per minute per instance, compared to 59,484 metrics per minute in NGINX Plus.

The table below shows the estimated storage requirements for NGINX OSS, based on the number of instances and a 14-day retention period.

Firewall ports

NGINX Instance Manager and NGINX Agent use the Unix domain socket by default and proxy through the gateway on port 443.

To ensure smooth communication, make sure port 443 is open on any firewalls between NGINX Instance Manager, NGINX Agent, and other systems they need to communicate with. This allows secure HTTPS traffic to pass through.

Logging

NGINX Instance Manager stores its log files in /var/log/nms. To prevent your system from running out of disk space as logs grow, we recommend either creating a separate partition for logs or enabling log rotation.

Supported Browsers

The NGINX Instance Manager web interface works best on the latest versions of these browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Microsoft Edge

Support for NGINX App Protect WAF

NGINX Instance Manager supports the following versions of NGINX App Protect WAF:

Security Monitoring Module

Dependencies with NGINX Instance Manager

Control plane requirements

The Security Monitoring module requires the following versions of NGINX Instance Manager to be installed on the management plane.

Note:
The Security Monitoring module doesn’t automatically install or upgrade NGINX Instance Manager. You’ll need to manually install or upgrade NGINX Instance Manager to a supported version.

Dependencies with NGINX App Protect WAF and NGINX Plus

Data plane requirements

The Security Monitoring module requires the following versions of NGINX App Protect WAF and NGINX Plus for the data plane:

NGINX Agent

Data plane requirements

• Supported distributions: The NGINX Agent can run on most environments. For the supported distributions, see the NGINX Agent Technical Specs guide.