Enable monitoring

Monitoring your application’s performance is crucial for maintaining its reliability and efficiency. NGINXaaS for Azure seamlessly integrates with Azure Monitor, allowing you to collect, correlate, and analyze metrics for a thorough understanding of your application’s health and behavior. With Azure Monitor, you gain access to a wealth of information regarding your application’s operations. You can:

Review Metrics: Examine the performance data collected from your application.
Correlate Data: Connect different data points to gain insights into application performance trends.
Analyze Performance: Dive deep into metrics to gain a comprehensive understanding of how your application operates.
Create Alerts: Set up proactive monitoring by configuring alerts that notify you of potential issues before they escalate.

Note:
NGINXaaS for Azure publishes custom metrics to Azure Monitor. To learn about the differences between standard and custom metrics, refer to the Custom metrics in Azure Monitor overview documentation from Microsoft.

Prerequisites

A user assigned managed identity or a system assigned managed identity with Monitoring Metrics Publisher role.

Note:
When a user assigned managed identity or a system assigned managed identity is added to the deployment through portal, this role is automatically added.

User must be an owner or user access administrator for NGINX deployment resource to complete this set up.
If you’re unfamiliar with Azure Monitor, refer to the Azure monitor overview documentation from Microsoft.

Enable monitoring

Log in to the Azure portal and navigate to your NGINXaaS for Azure deployment.
In the navigation pane under Settings, select the NGINX monitoring section.
Turn on the Send metrics to Azure Monitor setting.

View metrics with Azure Monitor metrics explorer

In the navigation pane under Monitoring, select the Metrics section to access the Azure Monitor metrics explorer for your NGINXaaS deployment.
Refer to the Azure Monitor metrics explorer documentation from Microsoft to learn how you can create queries.

Note:
Many of NGINX Plus’s advanced statistics need to be enabled in the “nginx.conf” file before they will appear in the metrics explorer, for example “plus.http.request.bytes_*”. Refer to Gathering Data to Appear in Statistics to learn more.

Retrieve metrics through Azure Monitor API

This section shows you how to effectively discover, gather and analyze NGINXaaS metrics through the Azure Monitor API.

Note:
Refer to Authenticate Azure Monitor requests for instructions on authenticating your API requests against the Azure Monitor API endpoint.

Retrieve metric namespaces: Each metric belongs to a category, or “namespace”, which groups similar types of metrics together. We recommend listing all namespaces for NGINXaaS to locate the metrics you’re interested in. The following curl example shows how to retrieve all metrics namespaces on your NGINXaaS deployment:

curl --request GET --header "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/12345678-abcd-98765432-abcdef012345/resourceGroups/my-nginx-rg/providers/NGINX.NGINXPLUS/nginxDeployments/my-nginx-dep/providers/microsoft.insights/metricNamespaces?api-version=2024-02-01"

The following JSON shows an example response body:

{
  "value": [
 	...
	{
      "id": "/subscriptions/12345678-abcd-98765432-abcdef012345/resourceGroups/my-nginx-rg/providers/NGINX.NGINXPLUS/nginxDeployments/my-nginx-dep/providers/microsoft.insights/metricNamespaces/NGINX Connections Statistics",
      "name": "nginx connections statistics",
	  "type": "Microsoft.Insights/metricNamespaces",
      "classification": "Custom",
      "properties": {
        "metricNamespaceName": "nginx connections statistics"
      }
    },
	...
  ]
}

Retrieve metric definitions: Metrics definitions give you insights into the various metrics available for NGINXaaS within a namespace and what they represent. The following curl example shows how to retrieve all metrics definitions within the nginx connections statistics namespace for your NGINXaaS deployment:

curl --request GET --header "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/12345678-abcd-98765432-abcdef012345/resourceGroups/my-nginx-rg/providers/NGINX.NGINXPLUS/nginxDeployments/my-nginx-dep/providers/microsoft.insights/metricDefinitions?metricnamespace=nginx%20connections%20statistics&api-version=2024-02-01"

The following JSON shows an example response body:

{
  "value": [
	...
    {
      "id": "/subscriptions/12345678-abcd-98765432-abcdef012345/resourceGroups/my-nginx-rg/providers/NGINX.NGINXPLUS/nginxDeployments/my-nginx-dep/providers/microsoft.insights/metricdefinitions/Nginx Connections Statistics/nginx.conn.current",
      "resourceId": "/subscriptions/12345678-abcd-98765432-abcdef012345/resourceGroups/my-nginx-rg/providers/NGINX.NGINXPLUS/nginxDeployments/my-nginx-deployment",
      "namespace": "NGINX Connections Statistics",
      "name": {
        "value": "nginx.conn.current",
        "localizedValue": "nginx.conn.current"
      },
      ...
    },
	...
  ]
}

Metric values: Finally, you can obtain the actual metric values which represent real-time or historical data points that tell you how your NGINXaaS is performing. The following curl example shows how to retrieve the value of metric nginx.conn.current within the nginx connections statistics namespace over a 10-minute time window averaged over 5 minute intervals:

curl --request GET --header "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/12345678-abcd-98765432-abcdef012345/resourceGroups/my-nginx-rg/providers/NGINX.NGINXPLUS/nginxDeployments/my-nginx-dep/providers/microsoft.insights/metrics?metricnamespace=nginx%20connections%20statistics&metricnames=nginx.conn.current&timespan=2024-03-27T20:00:00Z/2024-03-27T20:10:00Z&aggregation=Average&interval=PT5M&api-version=2024-02-01"

The following JSON shows an example response body:

{
  "cost": 9,
  "timespan": "2024-03-27T20:00:00Z/2024-03-27T20:10:00Z",
  "interval": "PT5M",
  "value": [
    {
      "id": "/subscriptions/12345678-abcd-98765432-abcdef012345/resourceGroups/my-nginx-rg/providers/NGINX.NGINXPLUS/nginxDeployments/my-nginx-dep/providers/Microsoft.Insights/metrics/nginx.conn.current",
      "type": "Microsoft.Insights/metrics",
      "name": {
        "value": "nginx.conn.current",
        "localizedValue": "nginx.conn.current"
      },
      "unit": "Unspecified",
      "timeseries": [
        {
          "metadatavalues": [],
          "data": [
            {
              "timeStamp": "2024-03-27T20:00:00Z",
              "average": 4
            },
            {
              "timeStamp": "2024-03-27T20:05:00Z",
              "average": 4
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "errorCode": "Success"
    }
  ],
  "namespace": "nginx connections statistics",
  "resourceregion": "eastus2"
}

Note:
Refer to the Metrics Catalog for a listing of available namespaces and metrics.