Enable metrics

The NGINX One Console dashboard relies on APIs for NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source Stub Status to report traffic and system metrics. The following sections show you how to enable those metrics.

Enable NGINX Plus API

To collect comprehensive metrics for NGINX Plus–including bytes streamed, information about upstream systems and caches, and counts of all HTTP status codes–add the following to your NGINX Plus configuration file (for example, /etc/nginx/nginx.conf or an included file):

# Enable the /api/ location with appropriate access control
# to use the NGINX Plus API.
#
location /api/ {
    api write=on;
    allow 127.0.0.1;
    deny all;
}

This configuration:

  • Enables the NGINX Plus API.
  • Allows requests only from 127.0.0.1 (localhost).
  • Blocks all other requests for security.

For more details, see the NGINX Plus API module documentation.

After saving the changes, reload NGINX to apply the new configuration:

nginx -s reload

Enable NGINX Open Source Stub Status API

To collect basic metrics about server activity for NGINX Open Source, add the following to your NGINX configuration file:

server {
    listen 127.0.0.1:8080;
    location /api {
        stub_status;
        allow 127.0.0.1;
        deny all;
    }
}

This configuration:

  • Enables the stub status API.
  • Allows requests only from 127.0.0.1 (localhost).
  • Blocks all other requests for security.

For more details, see the NGINX Stub Status module documentation.

After saving the changes, reload NGINX to apply the new configuration:

nginx -s reload