Technical Specifications
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.
You can deploy NGINX Instance Manager in the following environments:
- Bare metal
- Container
- Public cloud: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure
- Virtual machine
The following table lists the Linux distributions supported by NGINX Instance Manager and NGINX App Protect:
| Distribution | Version | Architecture | NGINX Instance Manager Support | NGINX App Protect Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Linux | 2 LTS | x86_64 | Supported | Support discontinued as of 2.18.0 |
| CentOS | 7.4 and later in the 7.x family | x86_64 | Support discontinued as of 2.17.0 | Supported |
| Debian | 11 12 |
x86_64 x86_64 |
Supported Supported on 2.13.0+ |
Supported Supported |
| Oracle Linux | 7.4 and later in the 7.x family 8.0 and later in the 8.x family |
x86_64 x86_64 |
Supported Supported on 2.6.0+ |
Supported Supported |
| RHEL | 7.4 and later in the 7.x family 8.x and later in the 8.x family 9.x and later in the 9.x family |
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 |
Support discontinued as of 2.17.0 Supported Supported on 2.6.0+ |
Supported Supported Supported |
| Ubuntu | 20.04 22.04 24.04 |
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 |
Supported Supported on 2.3.0+ Supported on 2.18.0+ |
Supported Supported Supported |
NGINX Instance Manager supports the following NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus versions:
| NGINX Instance Manager | NGINX OSS | NGINX Plus |
|---|---|---|
| 2.18.0 and later | 1.18–1.28.0 | R31–R34 |
| 2.16.0–2.17.x | 1.18–1.25.1 | R31–R32 |
| 2.7.0–2.15.x | 1.18–1.25.1 | R21–R30 |
| 2.0.0–2.6.0 | 1.18–1.21.6 | R21–R27 |
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. If you set up deployments with NGINX App Protect, you may need additional memory and CPU.
This section outlines the recommendations for NGINX Instance Manager deployments with data plane instances using standard configurations, without NGINX App Protect. 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.
| Number of Data Plane Instances | CPU | Memory | Network | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 2 vCPU | 4 GB RAM | 1 GbE NIC | 100 GB |
| 100 | 2 vCPU | 4 GB RAM | 1 GbE NIC | 1 TB |
| 1000 | 4 vCPU | 8 GB RAM | 1 GbE NIC | 3 TB |
These values represent the minimum resources needed for deployments that fall under standard configurations.
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, without NGINX App Protect.
| Number of Data Plane Instances | CPU | Memory | Network | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 4 vCPU | 8 GB RAM | 1 GbE NIC | 1 TB |
| 250 | 4 vCPU | 8 GB RAM | 1 GbE NIC | 2 TB |
If using NGINX App Protect features in NGINX Instance Manager, this requires additional CPU and Memory for policy compilation and security monitoring features. At a minimum, 8gb Memory and 4 CPUs are required for a standard NGINX App Protect use case (under 20 NGINX Plus instances). The requirements are heavily dependent on the number of policies being managed, the frequency of updates and the number of events being that occur in the security monitoring feature.
(New in 2.20.0) You can run NGINX Instance Manager without installing ClickHouse. This setup is useful if you don’t need monitoring data or prefer a simpler deployment. It reduces system requirements and removes the need to manage a metrics database. You can add ClickHouse later if your needs change. For instructions, see Disable metrics collection.
In Lightweight mode, we tested NGINX Instance Manager with ten managed NGINX instances and configuration publishing. It ran with as little as 1 CPU core and 1 GB of memory (without App Protect). When App Protect was enabled, we needed 2 CPU cores and 4 GB of memory to compile policies.
These figures are guidelines only. They reflect the minimum tested configuration and may cause performance issues depending on your setup. For better performance, consider allocating more system resources.
This section applies when you’ve set up NGINX Instance Manager to handle licensing and usage reporting only. In this setup, NGINX instances report license and usage data in an “unmanaged” way. Each instance sends periodic updates to NGINX Instance Manager for counting purposes only.
For details on how to configure this setup, see Prepare your environment for reporting.
When used only for licensing and usage reporting, NGINX Instance Manager has minimal system requirements. We recommend using Lightweight mode in this case to avoid the ClickHouse dependency, especially if you don’t plan to use other features.
| Number of Data Plane Instances | CPU | Memory | Network | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| n/a | 2 vCPU | 4 GB RAM | 1 GbE NIC | 20 GB |
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.
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.
| Config Size | Instances | Retention (days) | Estimated Disk Usage (NGINX Plus) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small Size | 10 | 14 | 5 GiB |
| 50 | 14 | 25 GiB | |
| 100 | 14 | 45 GiB | |
| 1000 | 14 | 450 GiB | |
| Medium Size | 10 | 14 | 25 GiB |
| 50 | 14 | 126 GiB | |
| 100 | 14 | 251 GiB | |
| 500 | 14 | 1.157 TiB | |
| Generic Large Size | 10 | 14 | 100 GiB |
| 50 | 14 | 426 GiB | |
| 100 | 14 | 850 GiB | |
| 250 | 14 | 2 TiB |
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.
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.
| Config Size | Instances | Retention (days) | Estimated Disk Usage (NGINX OSS) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generic Large Size | 10 | 14 | 200 MiB |
| 50 | 14 | 850 MiB | |
| 100 | 14 | 1.75 GiB | |
| 250 | 14 | 4 GiB |
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.
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.
The NGINX Instance Manager web interface works best on the latest versions of these browsers:
NGINX Instance Manager supports the following versions of NGINX App Protect WAF:
| NGINX Instance Manager | NGINX App Protect WAF |
|---|---|
| 2.17.0–2.20.0 | Release 4.8.0–4.15.0, 5.1.0–5.7.0 |
| 2.15.1–2.16.0 | Release 4.8.0–4.10.0 |
| 2.14.1–2.15.0 | Release 4.4.0–4.7.0 |
| 2.13.0–2.14.0 | Release 4.3.0–4.5.0 |
| 2.12.0 | Release 4.2.0–4.5.0 |
| 2.11.0 | Release 4.1.0–4.3.0 |
| 2.10.0–2.10.1 | Release 4.0.0–4.3.0 |
| 2.9.0–2.9.1 | Release 3.12.2–4.2.0 |
| 2.8.0 | Release 3.12.2–4.1.0 |
| 2.7.0 | Release 3.12.2–4.0.0 |
| 2.6.0 | Release 3.12.2 |
The Security Monitoring module requires the following versions of NGINX Instance Manager to be installed on the management plane.
Note: In NGINX Instance Manager 2.18.0 and under, the Security Monitoring module was a separate package that was installed manually. From NGINX Instance Manager 2.19.0 onward, Security Monitoring is part of the NGINX Instance Manager feature-set and is packaged by default; no manual installation or upgrade is needed.
| Security Monitoring | Instance Manager |
|---|---|
| 1.7.1 | 2.14.1–2.18.0 |
| 1.7.0 | 2.14.0 |
| 1.6.0 | 2.12.0–2.13.0 |
| 1.5.0 | 2.11.0 |
| 1.4.0 | 2.10.0–2.10.1 |
| 1.3.0 | 2.9.0 |
| 1.2.0 | 2.8.0 |
| 1.1.0 | 2.7.0 |
| 1.0.0 | 2.6.0 |
The Security Monitoring module requires the following versions of NGINX App Protect WAF and NGINX Plus for the data plane:
Note: In NGINX Instance Manager 2.18.0 and under, the Security Monitoring module was a separate package that was installed manually. From NGINX Instance Manager 2.19.0 onward, Security Monitoring is part of the NGINX Instance Manager feature-set and is packaged by default; no manual installation or upgrade is needed.
| Security Monitoring | NGINX App Protect WAF |
|---|---|
| 1.7.1 | Release 4.7.0–4.12.0, 5.1.0–5.4.0 |
| 1.7.0 | Release 4.4.0–4.7.0 |
| 1.6.0 | Release 4.3.0–4.4.0 |
| 1.5.0 | Release 4.3.0 |
| 1.4.0 | Release 4.2.0 |
| 1.3.0 | Release 3.12.2–4.2.0 |
| 1.2.0 | Release 3.12.2–4.1.0 |
| 1.1.0 | Release 3.12.2–4.0.0 |
| 1.0.0 | Release 3.12.2 |
- Supported distributions: The NGINX Agent can run on most environments. For the supported distributions, see the NGINX Agent Technical Specs guide.