Reporting NGINX Plus Installation Counts for Compliance

Since Release 31, NGINX Plus provides a built-in support for reporting of your NGINX Plus instances to NGINX Instance Manager without the need of installing NGINX Agent or tuning HTTP Health checks. If you participate in the F5 Flex Consumption Program, you will no longer need to manually track your NGINX Plus instances.

Usage reporting is enabled by default. At each startup, NGINX Plus attempts to discover NGINX Instance Manager via a DNS lookup of the nginx-mgmt.local hostname. Then NGINX Plus establishes a TLS connection to NGINX Instance Manager and every 30 minutes reports its version number, hostname, and identifier.

If NGINX instance reporting is not configured or NGINX Plus cannot provide its usage information to NGINX Instance Manager, a warning message will be logged.

Parameters customization can be done with the ngx_mgmt_module module, in particular if you need to:

• use mTLS for enhanced security (recommended)

• define a custom resolver

• use an IP address or a different hostname to identify NGINX Instance Manager

• specify other custom parameters such as reporting time, path to the reporting file, etc.

Enabling Mutual Client Certificate Auth Setup (mTLS)

It is highly recommended to secure and authorize NGINX Plus instance with NGINX Instance Manager by using client certificates unique to each endpoint.

1. Obtain a certificate, a key, and a CA certificate on both the NGINX Management Suite and NGINX Plus instance. See the Secure Traffic with Certificates for instructions on how to generate keys.

2. In the configuration file of NGINX Plus instance, on the main level, add the mgmt block:

   mgmt {
       #...
   
   }
   

3. Set up a HTTPS server that accepts and terminates the traffic from NGINX Instance Manager. Inside the mgmt block, specify the path to the client certificate and private key file with the ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key directives:

   mgmt {
       ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
       ssl_ciphers   DEFAULT;
   
       ssl_certificate     client_cert.pem;
       ssl_certificate_key client_cert.key;
       #...
   }
   

   While the server certificate is a public entity and is sent to NMS, the private key is a secure entity and should be stored in a file with restricted access.

4. Configure the verification of the NMS server certificate to validate the authenticity of NMS:

   mgmt {
       #...
       ssl_trusted_certificate  trusted_ca_cert.crt;
       ssl_verify               on;
       ssl_verify_depth         2;
   }
   

   Full configuration:

   mgmt {
       resolver 10.0.0.1;
   
       ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
       ssl_ciphers   DEFAULT;
   
       ssl_certificate     client_cert.pem;
       ssl_certificate_key client_cert.key;
   
       ssl_trusted_certificate  trusted_ca_cert.crt;
       ssl_verify               on;
       ssl_verify_depth         2;
   }
   

5. Reload the NGINX Plus configuration:

   sudo nginx -s reload
   

6. Make the corresponding changes on the NGINX Instance Manager server side. See Secure Client Access and Network Traffic for NMS

Specifying a custom resolver

If there is a custom DNS server in your corporate network, you can specify its address with the resolver directive in the mgmt block:

mgmt {
    resolver 10.0.0.1;
    #...
}

By default, NGINX Plus re-resolves DNS records at the frequency specified by time‑to‑live (TTL) in the record, but you can override the TTL value with the valid parameter; in the example it is 300 seconds, or 5 minutes.

Also, the optional ipv6=off parameter means only IPv4 addresses are used, though resolving of both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses is supported by default:

mgmt {
    resolver 10.0.0.1 valid=300s ipv6=off;
    #...
}

To make the resolver statistics appear in Live Activity Monitoring Dashboard), specify the status_zone parameter of the resolver directive:

mgmt {
    resolver 10.0.0.1 status_zone=resolver-zone1;
    #...
}

Defining custom address for NGINX Instance Manager

There are several ways to configure the address of NGINX Instance Manager:

• (recommended) add an A record to your local DNS that will associate the default hostname with the IP address of the system running NGINX Instance Manager

• set the address with the endpoint parameter of the usage_report directive, by default the address is nginx-mgmt.local:

  mgmt {
      resolver     10.0.0.1;
      usage_report endpoint=nms.local interval=15m;
      #...
  }
  

  If the name resolves into several IP addresses, the first IP address will be used.

Configuration Example

#...

mgmt {
    usage_report endpoint=nginx-mgmt.local interval=30m;
    resolver     DNS_IP;

    uid_file /var/lib/nginx/nginx.id;

    ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
    ssl_ciphers   DEFAULT;

    ssl_certificate     client_cert.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key client_cert.key;

    ssl_trusted_certificate  trusted_ca_cert.crt;
    ssl_verify               on;
    ssl_verify_depth         2;
}

#...