About

Learn about NGINX Management Suite.

NGINX Management Suite is a family of management plane solutions that enable governance of the NGINX data plane to easily scale, secure, and monitor applications and APIs. It consists of several modules:

Instance Manager:

Instance Manager allows you to configure, scale, and manage NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus instances.

The Instance Manager module was initially developed as a REST API that uses standard authentication methods, HTTP response codes, and verbs. The Instance Manager REST API allows you to access all of the module’s features, manage Instance Manager objects and the NGINX Management Suite platform programmatically, view metrics, edit configurations, manage certificates, create users, and more.

The Instance Manager features available through NGINX Management Suite’s web interface are built on top of this REST API.

Instance Manager Key Features

Instance Manager provides the following features:

View metrics and information about data plane host systems and NGINX instances
View, edit, and publish NGINX configurations
Save NGINX configurations for future deployment
Analyze NGINX configurations for syntactic errors before publishing them
Scan the network to find unmanaged NGINX instances.
Manage certificates
Create users, roles, and role permissions for role-based access control

API Connectivity Manager:

API Connectivity Manager enables self-service and automation of API delivery. API Connectivity Manager allows you to deploy, configure, secure, monitor, and govern API gateways at scale.

The API Connectivity Manager module provides a REST API that uses standard authentication methods, HTTP response codes, and verbs.

You can use the API Connectivity Manager API to connect, secure, and govern your APIs. In addition, API Connectivity Manager lets you separate infrastructure lifecycle management from the API lifecycle, allowing your IT/Ops teams and application developers to work independently.

API Connectivity Manager Key Features

The API Connectiviy Manager module provides the following features:

Create and manage isolated workspaces
Create and manage API infrastructure in isolated workspaces
Enforce uniform security policies across workspaces using global policies
Create Developer Portals with custom color themes, logos, and favicons
Onboard APIs to an API Gateway and publish API documentation to the Developer Portal
Apply policies to API proxies to provide custom quality of service for individual applications
Issue API keys or basic authentication credentials for access to the API

App Delivery Manager:

App Delivery Manager is built on top of the NGINX Management Suite platform and sits alongside the Instance Manager module. As such, uses many of the features that are included with the Instance Manager module, such as authentication, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), instance groups, and certificate management.

App Delivery Manager Key Features

The App Delivery Manager module provides an abstraction over the NGINX configuration, allowing individual teams to deploy their custom apps independently. App Delivery Manager hides the complexities of the NGINX configuration through a simple high-level API abstraction of the NGINX contexts and common directives. We refer to this abstraction as the app-centric view of the configuration.

This app-centric view addresses the following concerns:

Complexity: Managing, maintaining, validating, and applying large sets of individual configurations from different sources.
Fragility: Teams can validate and test configurations before placing them into production, making it easier to fail fast and ensuring that production user traffic keeps flowing.
Safety: Various business units can be given fine-grain ownership over configuration elements, when necessary.
Self-Service: By isolating app teams from one another, you can allow each team to independently deploy and update the configuration for their apps without requiring intervention. This removes artificial gates that previously prevented teams from quickly delivering their updated apps and allows for the integration of the CI/CD process into their development workflow.

This is all done behind a simple API abstraction provided by App Delivery Manager. For teams that need more control of the NGINX configuration or access to the rich set of directives and dynamic modules, the App Delivery Manager service provides a template facility to expand the API and the resulting possibilities for the NGINX configuration.

Security Monitoring

Security Monitoring allows you to monitor NGINX App Protect WAF with analytics dashboards and security log details to get protection insights for analyzing possible threats or areas for tuning policies.

Security Monitoring Key Features

The Security Monitoring module provides the following features:

Informative dashboards that provide valuable protection insights
In-depth security log details to help with analyzing possible threats and making policy decisions