The Best NGINX Monitoring Tools

NGINX is a high-performance web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer used to power some of the world’s busiest websites and applications. Its event-driven architecture enables it to efficiently handle thousands of concurrent connections. It is indeed a critical component in modern cloud, microservices, and API-driven environments. Because NGINX often sits between users and backend services, it directly impacts application performance, uptime, and the overall user experience. Any slowdown, misconfiguration, or failure at this layer can quickly cascade into widespread service disruption.

Monitoring NGINX is therefore essential for maintaining performance, reliability, and security. Without visibility into traffic patterns, error rates, and upstream health, you are left reacting to outages instead of preventing them. The right NGINX monitoring tools provide real-time metrics, alerts, and analytics to detect issues early and ensure consistent service delivery.

NGINX monitoring tools can help your organization avoid the following pain points:

• Unexpected outages that disrupt user access and impact revenue can be detected early and trigger alerts before services go down.
• Slow website or API response times caused by overloaded servers, inefficient configurations, or slow upstream applications.
• Rising 4xx and 5xx error rates indicate configuration issues, backend failures, or application bugs.
• Backend server failures go unnoticed, including unhealthy upstreams or failed health checks that silently degrade performance.
• Resource exhaustion (CPU, memory, disk I/O, connections) can cause instability or downtime if not addressed promptly.
• Undetected malicious or abnormal traffic, such as bot activity or potential DDoS attempts.

In this article, we’ll discuss the top NGINX monitoring tools available today. But before we do so, we’ll explain how we selected our tools. This way, you’ll understand the criteria for our rankings and feel confident that our recommendations are based on a clear, consistent assessment.

Here’s our list of the best NGINX monitoring tools:

Based on our independent research, selection requirements, and rating methodologies, here are the best NGINX monitoring tools on the market today:

1. ManageEngine Applications Manager EDITOR’S CHOICEOffers detailed NGINX performance monitoring (connections, response times, SSL metrics). Download a 30-day free trial.
2. Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL) Cloud-based monitoring of servers, NGINX performance counters, response times, availability, and alerts. Start a 30-day free trial.
3. NGINX Plus Live Activity Monitoring Built-in real-time monitoring dashboard available with NGINX Plus; shows key metrics like connections, upstream health, and cache stats
4. Datadog Full observability for NGINX: metrics, logs, dashboards, alerts, APM correlation across services.
5. NGINX One A centralized management and observability platform that provides a unified view of NGINX instances running across different environments.
6. Prometheus + Grafana Open-source metrics scraping and rich visualization often used with the NGINX stub_status module (a built-in module in NGINX that exposes basic operational metrics about the web server).
7. New Relic Application performance insights plus NGINX metrics/logs integration and detailed tracing.

Key points to consider before choosing or purchasing an NGINX monitoring tool

Here are the key points you need to consider before purchasing or choosing NGINX monitoring tools:

• Flexible Deployment: Make sure the tool works in your environment, whether you run NGINX on-premises, in the cloud, or across multiple environments.
• Essential Metric Tracking: Your chosen platform should clearly display key metrics, including traffic levels, response times, active connections, and error rates.
• Real-time Alerts: You need instant notifications when something goes wrong, with customizable alert thresholds to avoid unnecessary noise.
• Simple, Clear Dashboards: Look for clean visualizations that make it easy to spot issues without digging through complex reports.
• Ability to Scale: The solution should handle growth as you add more servers or experience higher traffic volumes.
• Strong Integrations: It should connect smoothly with your existing tools, such as APM platforms, cloud services, containers, or incident management systems.
• Minimal Performance Impact: Monitoring should not slow down your production NGINX servers or consume excessive resources.
• Transparent Pricing and Support: Choose a solution that fits your budget and provides reliable documentation, updates, and customer support as needed.

To dive deeper into how we incorporate these into our research and review methodology, skip to our detailed methodology section.

The Best NGINX Monitoring Tools

We’ve included a range of tools for Windows, macOS, and Linux. As part of our overview, we’ve highlighted solutions with NGINX integrations alongside monitoring essentials like customizable alerts, visualization options (such as graphs and charts) and dashboards.

1. ManageEngine Applications Manager (FREE TRIAL)

Best For: Small to medium-sized enterprises, DevOps teams, and IT operations teams

Price: Professional edition starts at US$395 for 10 monitors and 1 User

ManageEngine Applications Manager is an application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure monitoring tool. It is used to monitor the health, performance, and availability of applications, servers, databases, and web services in real time. It provides end-to-end visibility into enterprise applications to enable you to detect performance problems, analyze root causes, and maintain service availability.

ManageEngine Applications Manager monitors the availability and uptime of NGINX and other web servers by checking their reachability. During this process, it tracks important metrics such as the server’s running status (up or down), the HTTP response status, and the server’s response time. If the server becomes unavailable or starts responding slowly, the system automatically sends alerts to administrators.

It also collects performance metrics from the NGINX server to help detect issues and understand traffic patterns. These metrics include request rate, number of active connections, response time, data transferred, and error rates such as HTTP 4xx and 5xx. Monitoring these values helps identify performance bottlenecks, high traffic loads, or potential server problems.

One downside of using Application Manager to monitor NGINX is that it may require extra configuration to collect detailed metrics. The software may become costly as more servers are added for monitoring. Although it provides useful general monitoring features, it may not give you as many NGINX-specific insights as some specialized monitoring tools. This is based on how NGINX monitoring typically works and how the Applications Manager collects data. NGINX does not expose many internal metrics by default, so you may need to enable the NGINX status module or configure additional monitoring settings to collect detailed data.

ManageEngine Applications Manager Key Features:

• Availability and Uptime Monitoring: It monitors server status, HTTP response status, and response time to ensure the web server remains available. If the server becomes unreachable or slow, alerts can be triggered.
• Performance and Traffic Metrics: Applications Manager tracks key NGINX metrics, including active connections, request rates, response times, and HTTP error rates (4xx and 5xx).
• HTTP and URL Monitoring: The platform can send automated HTTP requests to NGINX-hosted websites to measure page load times, response codes, and overall availability.
• Alerts and Threshold Management: Administrators can configure thresholds for key metrics. If values exceed these limits.
• Dashboards and Reporting: Applications Manager provides dashboards and historical reports that display NGINX performance data in graphs and charts for easier trend analysis and capacity planning.

Unique Buying Proposition

The unique selling point of ManageEngine Applications Manager for NGINX monitoring is its full-stack monitoring capability. It can track the performance of NGINX along with the applications, servers, and databases connected to it. In real systems, NGINX problems are often caused by issues in other parts of the infrastructure, such as slow databases or overloaded servers. The Applications Manager helps you see the bigger picture so you can quickly identify the root cause of a problem.

Another advantage is the detailed visibility it provides into NGINX activity. The software tracks key metrics, including active connections, request rates, response times, and error rates. Monitoring these metrics helps you understand traffic patterns and detect performance issues early. Applications Manager brings these capabilities together in a single, integrated platform that is relatively easy to deploy and manage.

Feature-In-Focus: NGINX performance monitoring and visibility

This feature focuses on collecting and analyzing key NGINX metrics, including active connections, request rates, response times, error rates, and server availability. Monitoring and analyzing these NGINX performance metrics helps detect performance issues, traffic spikes, or service disruptions early.

Why do we recommend ManageEngine Applications Manager?

We recommend ManageEngine Applications Manager for NGINX monitoring because it provides full visibility into both the web server and the surrounding infrastructure. It also monitors the applications, servers, and databases connected to it. The platform also includes built-in dashboards, alerts, and reporting.

Who is ManageEngine Applications Manager recommended for?

The target market for Applications Manager includes organizations that manage multiple applications and servers and need centralized monitoring. It is also suitable for small to medium-sized enterprises, DevOps teams, and IT operations teams that want a single platform to monitor web servers, applications, and infrastructure. Companies running web applications, APIs, or high-traffic websites using NGINX can benefit from its integrated monitoring, alerting, and performance analysis capabilities.

ManageEngine Applications Manager can be deployed on-premises (Windows or Linux) to monitor a wide range of infrastructure components and applications across both on-prem and cloud environments.

The product is available in Free, Professional, and Enterprise editions. The free tier is for small environments and typically supports up to five monitors. There is a 30-day free trial of the full Professional or Enterprise edition, after which the installation automatically converts to a free edition if no license is applied. Licensing is based on the number of monitors being tracked. You can choose between an annual subscription license and a perpetual license with annual maintenance and support.

ManageEngine Applications Manager Download a 30-day FREE Trial

2. Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL)

Best For: SMBs and resource-constrained organizations that need dependable NGINX monitoring.

Price: The lowest paid plan (Lite) starts at $9 per month

Site24x7 is a cloud-based observability platform designed for IT operations and DevOps. The software simplifies the management of IT infrastructure, applications, and websites without requiring a large IT team. It provides real-time visibility into server uptime, application performance, network health, and website reliability.

Site24x7 supports a wide range of technologies, including open-source technologies and the NGINX platform. Site24x7 supports monitoring of NGINX through its server-monitoring framework and a dedicated NGINX plugin. In practice, NGINX monitoring in Site24x7 is implemented through a plugin-based integration installed on the server agent.

Once deployed, the plugin periodically gathers operational data from the NGINX server and sends it to the Site24x7 platform for analysis and visualization. The setup works for both open-source NGINX and NGINX Plus. The collected metrics appear in performance charts and dashboards within the monitoring console.

Beyond raw metrics, Site24x7 integrates alerting, log analysis, and dashboards with NGINX monitoring. As the admin, you can define thresholds for your key metrics and receive alerts when anomalies occur.

Site24x7 Key Features:

• NGINX Performance Monitoring: Site24x7 collects and tracks key NGINX performance metrics through its server monitoring agent and plugin system.
• Real-time Alerts and Threshold Monitoring: Administrators can configure thresholds for important metrics such as request rate, connection count, or error responses. If these metrics exceed the defined limits, Site24x7 automatically triggers alerts
• SSL and Connection Monitoring: Site24x7 monitors SSL handshake statistics and connection activity. This is useful when you use NGINX as a reverse proxy or load balancer handling encrypted traffic.
• Dashboards and Performance Visualization: The platform provides dashboards that display NGINX metrics in graphs and charts. These visualizations help you analyze performance trends, monitor traffic behavior, and quickly identify unusual patterns or bottlenecks.
• Integration with Infrastructure Monitoring: Site24x7 allows NGINX monitoring to be viewed alongside server, application, and network monitoring within the same platform.
• Public & Private Cloud Monitoring: Monitor AWS, Azure, GCP, and VMware resources to control costs and catch issues early.
• AIOps Automation: Use AI to detect anomalies, reduce alert noise, and automate routine responses.

Unique Buying Proposition

The unique value proposition of Site24x7 as a monitoring solution for NGINX is its cloud-native monitoring platform and flexible plugin ecosystem, which provide deep NGINX visibility. Site24x7 offers a ready-to-use plugin that integrates directly with its server monitoring agent. This plugin collects key NGINX performance metrics and sends them to a centralized cloud dashboard where you can visualize performance, analyze trends, and troubleshoot issues quickly.

You can also extend monitoring with built-in plugins or custom scripts. The flexibility makes it possible to monitor specific NGINX behaviors or environment-specific metrics that standard monitoring tools may not capture.

Feature-In-Focus: Plugin-based NGINX performance monitoring

The plugin-based NGINX performance monitoring feature allows Site24x7 to collect detailed operational metrics from NGINX servers using a lightweight monitoring agent and plugin integration. This feature is important because it provides real-time insight into NGINX traffic behavior and server load.

Why do we recommend Site24x7?

We recommend Site24x7 because it provides maturity and operational reliability that many monitoring tools in its tier do not consistently deliver. Its feature set has been shaped over nearly two decades of real-world use across a wide mix of industries.

It’s also important to note that its development is backed by ManageEngine and Zoho, both of which have long-standing expertise in IT monitoring and cloud software engineering. This background shows in the platform’s stability, its ability to handle diverse workloads, and its structured approach to security and compliance.

Who is Site24x7 recommended for?

Site24x7 is recommended for SMBs, NGOs, and resource-constrained IT teams that need dependable NGINX monitoring. It also fits organizations with distributed operations, remote offices, or hybrid cloud setups that need consistent visibility across locations and workloads.

Site24x7 comes in three pricing tiers: Lite, Professional, and Enterprise. The Lite plan is intended for small environments. The Professional plan, which is the most popular option, expands monitoring capacity. The Enterprise plan is for larger environments that run multiple NGINX nodes or need additional capabilities. It includes all features available in the Professional plan. Its licensing model is structured around the number and types of monitors in use. In this system, each monitored resource consumes a monitor license.

In Site24x7, an NGINX server is typically monitored through a server monitor with an NGINX plugin. Each monitored NGINX host consumes one monitor license within a subscription plan. If you run multiple NGINX instances, each instance usually requires its own monitor. As a result, the cost of monitoring NGINX scales with the number of servers being monitored. You can start the 30-day free trial.

Site24x7 Start 30-day FREE Trial

3. NGINX Plus

Best For: Organizations that run critical web applications and rely on NGINX as a key part of their infrastructure.

Price: Contact authorised resellers for pricing details

F5 NGINX Plus is a commercial, enterprise version of NGINX developed by F5. While the open-source version provides core web server and reverse proxy functionality, NGINX Plus adds advanced enterprise capabilities such as load balancing, high availability, security controls, and built-in monitoring.

NGINX Plus’s built-in monitoring (Live Activity Monitoring) provides real-time metrics via a dashboard and an API. You can view important information, including active and idle connections, requests per second, response status codes, data throughput, and the health of upstream servers. These metrics help you monitor server performance and quickly detect traffic spikes or unusual behavior.

Because NGINX Plus is often used as a load balancer, it can also monitor the health of backend servers. It shows details such as backend response times, server availability, failed requests, and the distribution of traffic across servers. NGINX Plus also provides a live monitoring dashboard and an API for integration with external tools.

NGINX Plus Key Features:

• Live Activity Dashboard and Status API: Provide real-time visibility into NGINX server activity and expose detailed performance metrics for monitoring systems.
• Advanced Load Balancing: NGINX Plus provides advanced load-balancing capabilities that distribute traffic across multiple backend servers.
• High Availability and Failover: The platform supports high availability by automatically redirecting traffic to healthy servers if a backend server fails.
• Built-in Monitoring and Analytics: NGINX Plus includes built-in monitoring tools that provide real-time metrics, including connection status, request rates, and server health.
• Dynamic Configuration and Management: As the admin, you can update upstream server configurations without restarting the service. This allows changes to be applied with minimal disruption to running applications.
• API Gateway Capabilities: NGINX Plus can function as an API gateway. It provides features such as request routing, rate limiting, and authentication to manage and secure API traffic.
• Security and access Control: The platform includes security features such as SSL/TLS termination, access controls, and traffic filtering to help protect applications and data.
• Integration with Monitoring Tools: NGINX Plus can integrate with external monitoring and observability platforms to collect metrics, visualize performance data, and trigger alerts.

Unique Buying Proposition

The real differentiator of NGINX Plus for monitoring is its deep operational visibility at the application delivery layer. Since NGINX Plus serves as the reverse proxy, load balancer, and main traffic gateway, it can observe key aspects of how traffic flows through the system. This includes client connection behavior, real-time request processing, the health and load of backend servers, API traffic patterns, and how failover or load-balancing decisions are made.

Because of this position in the architecture, monitoring occurs at the exact point where all application traffic passes. This gives your operations teams a clear and accurate view of live traffic and backend server health

Feature-In-Focus: Built-in monitoring and analytics

NGINX Plus includes built-in monitoring and analytics that provide real-time insight into how NGINX handles traffic and processes requests. This feature exposes operational metrics, including active connections, request rates, response status codes, and upstream server health, through a live activity dashboard and an API.

Why do we recommend NGINX Plus?

We recommend NGINX Plus not because it simply shows metrics, but because it is part of the traffic-handling layer itself, which changes how monitoring works. Other NGINX monitoring platforms collect metrics through agents, logs, exporters, or APIs.

However, NGINX Plus generates monitoring data from inside the application delivery engine that is already processing requests. Because of this, it can expose more precise operational data on connection states, load-balancing decisions, upstream health, and request-processing behavior.

Another reason we recommend it is operational efficiency in production environments. NGINX Plus simplifies monitoring with built-in APIs, dashboards, and upstream health visibility within the same platform that manages application traffic.

Who is NGINX Plus recommended for?

NGINX Plus is best suited for organizations that run mission-critical web applications or APIs and rely on NGINX as a central part of their application infrastructure. These environments often require advanced load balancing, high availability, and detailed operational visibility to maintain performance and uptime.

NGINX Plus can be deployed on-premises, in private data centers, or in cloud environments. NGINX Plus is available through a subscription model where you specify the number of instances you need. Licensing can also be obtained through perpetual licensing agreements or the F5 Flex Consumption Program.

The Flex Consumption program allows you to commit to multi-year spending with adjustments based on actual usage. You then commit to a 1-, 2-, or 3-year term that includes maintenance, updates, and support. You can purchase NGINX Plus through F5 partners or authorized resellers. Support and upgrades are bundled based on the selected agreement.

4. Datadog

Best For: Organizations that need to monitor the NGINX web server along with their applications and infrastructure.

Price: The Pro edition starts at $15 per host per month

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and observability platform that you can use to track the performance, availability, and health of your applications, servers, databases, and cloud infrastructure. It collects data from different parts of an IT environment and displays them through dashboards, alerts, and analytics tools

NGINX monitoring in Datadog typically begins with Infrastructure Monitoring, where you install a lightweight Datadog Agent on the server running NGINX. The built-in NGINX integration connects to the NGINX status endpoint and collects operational metrics. These metrics are sent to Datadog, where they are visualized via prebuilt dashboards and monitored with configurable alerts.

Beyond basic metrics, Datadog extends NGINX monitoring through Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Log Management. APM helps you track how requests move from NGINX to backend services. Datadog can also collect NGINX access and error logs to enable you to analyze HTTP errors, unusual traffic patterns, or security events.

In other words, several Datadog products can be used to monitor NGINX. However, in actual production environments, you typically rely on Infrastructure Monitoring to track server metrics, APM to follow requests as they move through applications, and Log Management to analyze access and error logs. Together, these tools provide a clearer view of how NGINX is performing and how it affects the applications running behind it.

Datadog Key Features:

• NGINX Metrics Monitoring: Datadog collects key performance metrics, including active connections, request rates, and connection status. These metrics help you understand server load and detect performance issues.
• Dashboards and Visualization: The platform provides built-in dashboards that display NGINX metrics in charts and graphs.
• Alerts and Notifications: Users can set alerts for metrics such as high traffic, connection spikes, or increased error rates. Datadog sends notifications when these thresholds are exceeded.
• Log-Based Custom Metrics: Datadog can collect and analyze NGINX access and error logs. It converts high-volume log patterns into metrics at ingestion, then retains them longer and analyzes them more efficiently.
• Request Tracing: Datadog can track requests as they move from NGINX to backend services to enable you to identify slow or failing parts of the system.

Unique Buying Proposition

The unique buying proposition of Datadog as an NGINX monitoring solution is its ability to provide full observability across metrics, logs, and request traces. Furthermore, its tight integration with modern cloud and microservices environments is another unique selling point. Datadog automatically integrates with cloud platforms, containers, and orchestration systems. You can deploy it to monitor NGINX instances running on virtual machines, in containers, or in Kubernetes environments.

Feature-In-Focus: NGINX is NGINX metrics monitoring.

This feature focuses on collecting and analyzing core NGINX performance metrics, including active connections, request rates, and connection states. These metrics give you direct insight into how the NGINX server is handling traffic. They also help you determine if the server is experiencing heavy load or performance issues.

Why do we recommend Datadog?

We recommend Datadog because it is designed for modern, dynamic environments where infrastructure and applications change frequently. Its cloud-native architecture allows you to monitor distributed systems across multiple servers, containers, and cloud platforms.

It provides you with hundreds of built-in integrations across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, databases, and business applications. You can start seeing value right away with minimal setup effort thanks to its predefined deployment and preconfigured settings.

Who is Datadog recommended for?

We recommend Datadog for DevOps teams, cloud-focused organizations, and enterprises running distributed application environments. Companies that rely on microservices, containers, or cloud platforms benefit the most because Datadog integrates easily with these technologies. It is also excellent for organizations that need to monitor web servers such as NGINX as part of a larger application and infrastructure monitoring strategy.

Datadog uses a host-based licensing model. Its cost depends on the number of infrastructure hosts (servers, virtual machines, or containers) you monitor. As your infrastructure grows and more hosts are added, the pricing scales accordingly. Datadog offers several pricing tiers for monitoring and security at varying levels.

The Free tier offers basic monitoring features and is suitable for small environments or initial testing. The Pro tier is intended for production use and provides more advanced monitoring capabilities and integrations. The Enterprise tier adds advanced features, such as machine-learning-based alerts, live process monitoring, and governance tools, most of which are designed for large environments. In addition, Datadog also offers DevSecOps tiers that include both infrastructure monitoring and security features.

5. NGINX One

Best For: Businesses that operate many instances of NGINX across different environments

Price: You need to request a quote or work with an F5 partner

NGINX One is a centralized management and observability platform that provides a unified view of NGINX instances running across different environments. It was introduced by F5 in 2024 to address a growing operational challenge faced by organizations running large numbers of NGINX instances across cloud, on-premises, and container environments.

As NGINX adoption expanded in modern application architectures, many organizations began operating dozens or even hundreds of NGINX servers distributed across different environments. Monitoring these instances individually or through separate tools made it difficult to maintain consistent visibility and quickly detect performance issues. NGINX One was therefore created to solve the challenge of limited visibility across multiple NGINX deployments.

Through dashboards and analytics, NGINX One collects performance metrics, configuration data, and operational insights to enable you monitor the health and performance of your NGINX infrastructure at scale. Although NGINX Plus already includes built-in monitoring, NGINX One extends monitoring capabilities by providing centralized visibility across many NGINX instances.

NGINX One Key Features:

• Centralized Management: From one SaaS console or through APIs, you can monitor your systems, update configurations, and manage multiple NGINX instances more easily.
• High Availability Support: The platform helps keep applications running reliably across different environments. This ensures that services remain accessible and continue to perform well even when infrastructure conditions change.
• Improved Visibility: NGINX One offers a centralized console that gives you a clearer view of your infrastructure and application performance.
• Role-Based Access Control: Administrators can control who has access to different parts of the system using role-based permissions.
• Unified Application Platform: NGINX One allows organizations to manage multiple NGINX components together within the same environment. As infrastructure needs grow or change, you can adjust your architecture more easily.
• AI Assistant: The platform includes an AI assistant that helps optimize and secure deployments. It also provides context-aware recommendations and helps simplify routine operational tasks.

Unique Buying Proposition

The unique value proposition of NGINX One is centralized visibility and management for large fleets of NGINX instances running across different environments. Many organizations run NGINX across multiple environments, including on-premises servers, cloud platforms, containers, and Kubernetes clusters. Running NGINX across many environments can make monitoring and managing each instance individually difficult.

NGINX One solves this problem and provides a single platform where you can monitor performance, check system health, manage configurations, and apply policies across all your NGINX deployments.

Why do we recommend NGINX One?

We recommend NGINX One because it solves the real operational challenges you face as your NGINX environments grow. When you run many NGINX servers across different platforms or locations, it becomes harder to keep track of performance, configurations, and system health. NGINX One makes it easier to monitor systems, spot issues early, and manage your NGINX environments more efficiently.

Who is NGINX One recommended for?

We recommend NGINX One for organizations that operate multiple NGINX instances across different environments, such as cloud platforms, data centers, containers, and Kubernetes clusters. It is an excellent tool for DevOps, platform engineering, and enterprise IT operations teams responsible for maintaining application delivery infrastructure.

NGINX One is offered as a subscription-based platform. To get the exact cost, you usually need to request a quote or work with an F5 partner based on the number of instances you plan to manage and your deployment requirements.

There is a 30-day free trial to download and test NGINX One in your environment before committing. Licensing is typically tied to the number of instances you manage, or on a per-node basis for Kubernetes. All paid subscriptions generally include updates, maintenance, and enterprise-level support.

6. Prometheus + Grafana

Best For: IT teams with moderate technical skills in SMBs and NGOs

Price: Free and open-source

Prometheus is a general-purpose monitoring and metrics collection system for modern infrastructure. Grafana, on the other hand, provides visually rich dashboards that make it easy to interpret complex metrics. Together, they form a modular, open-source observability stack that can monitor everything from server performance and application metrics to network traffic and service availability.

To monitor NGINX with Prometheus, you first enable the status module in the NGINX configuration, which exposes performance metrics such as connections and request statistics via a status endpoint. Because Prometheus cannot read these metrics directly in their native format, you, as the admin, must deploy the NGINX Prometheus Exporter. The NGINX Prometheus Exporter retrieves data from the NGINX status endpoint and converts it into Prometheus-compatible metrics. The exporter then exposes these metrics through an HTTP endpoint that Prometheus can periodically scrape and store for monitoring and analysis.

Once Prometheus collects the metrics, Grafana is commonly used to visualize them. Grafana connects to Prometheus as a data source and displays NGINX metrics through dashboards, charts, and alerts. For example, Grafana dashboards can show request rates, connection counts, and traffic trends over time using the Prometheus metrics collected from the exporter.

Prometheus + Grafana Key Features:

• Metrics Collection (Prometheus): Prometheus collects performance metrics from NGINX through exporters such as the NGINX Prometheus Exporter. These metrics are stored as time-series data for monitoring and analysis.
• Time-series Data Storage and Querying (Prometheus): Prometheus stores NGINX metrics as time-series data so that you can analyze them using the PromQL query language.
• Visualization and Dashboards (Grafana): Grafana connects to Prometheus and turns collected metrics into dashboards and charts.
• Alerting and Notifications: You can create alert rules based on NGINX metrics, such as high request rates or increasing error responses. Alerts can then be sent through different notification channels when thresholds are exceeded.
• Customizable Monitoring Environment: Because Prometheus and Grafana are flexible and extensible, you can customize dashboards, queries, and alerts to match your specific NGINX monitoring needs and infrastructure architecture..

Unique Buying Proposition

What differentiates the Prometheus and Grafana stack is the level of architectural control and openness it provides. It is a fully customizable, vendor-neutral observability architecture. You can adapt it to build a fully customized monitoring system where you control data collection, storage, query logic, dashboards, and alerting rules.

The customizable, vendor-neutral monitoring approach differs from most commercial monitoring platforms, which are usually delivered as pre-packaged SaaS systems with fixed data models.

Feature-In-Focus: Metrics collection and analysis

Prometheus collects metrics such as request rates, active connections, response codes, and traffic throughput through exporters and stores them as time series data. Grafana then turns this data into dashboards and visual charts that make it easier to understand how NGINX is performing. It helps track performance trends, spot unusual traffic or rising errors, and detect issues early

Why do we recommend Prometheus + Grafana?

We recommend Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring NGINX because they offer a flexible approach to building a monitoring system that adapts to different environments. You can decide how metrics are collected, analyzed, and visualized. You gain greater control over how your monitoring setup works. You can also use the tool to monitor other infrastructure components such as databases, containers, and cloud services.

Who is Prometheus + Grafana recommended for?

The Prometheus-Grafana stack is best suited for DevOps teams, platform engineers, and infrastructure teams. These teams typically manage large or dynamic environments where NGINX plays a key role in application delivery.

The Prometheus-Grafana stack can be deployed either as self-hosted open-source software or through managed cloud services. Prometheus is fully open-source and free under the Apache-2.0 license. Grafana is also available as a free open-source tool that you can deploy on-premises or within your own infrastructure. In addition, Grafana Cloud provides a managed service option. You can therefore run the stack entirely on-premises with no software licensing costs, or use the cloud service.

7. New Relic

Best For: IT teams responsible for maintaining the performance and reliability of modern applications and NGINX servers.

Price: Price is based on a quote or an estimate of how much data you send to the platform and how you use it.

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that monitors the performance, reliability, and health of applications, infrastructure, and services in real time.

New Relic can also be used as a monitoring solution for NGINX. You start by installing the New Relic Infrastructure Agent on the server running NGINX. The agent collects operational metrics from the NGINX service and the host system. These metrics are sent to the New Relic platform, where they are stored and visualized through dashboards. You can then monitor traffic patterns, track error rates, and detect abnormal behavior such as spikes in request volume or increasing response latency.

New Relic can also ingest NGINX access and error logs, which provide deeper insight into how requests are handled and where failures occur. You can search the log data and correlate it with infrastructure metrics to diagnose issues.

New Relic’s distributed tracing and application performance monitoring (APM) features also enable tracking of requests as they move from NGINX to backend services and databases. As a result, you gain a clearer view of how requests flow through the entire system.

New Relic Key Features:

• Infrastructure Metrics Monitoring: New Relic collects key performance metrics from NGINX servers, such as request rates, active connections, response times, and HTTP status codes.
• Log Monitoring: The platform can collect and analyze NGINX access and error logs which you can use to investigate errors and unusual traffic activity.
• Application Performance Monitoring: New Relic can trace requests as they move from NGINX to backend services and databases.
• Dashboards and Visualization: New Relic provides dashboards and charts that make it easier to view NGINX performance and traffic trends.
• Alerts and Notifications: You can set alerts for issues such as high response times or increasing error rates.
• Correlation of Monitoring Data: New Relic brings together different types of monitoring data (metrics, logs, and traces) into one platform so that you can view them in context

Unique Buying Proposition

New Relic’s differentiator is its unified observability platform, which empowers network admins to analyze NGINX performance in the context of the entire application. It stands out for its ability to help you understand how NGINX performance fits into the behavior of the entire application system.

Why is this important, you may ask? It is important because NGINX is often only one part of a larger application architecture. Understanding how NGINX performance fits into the overall system is key to identifying the root cause of problems more quickly.

Feature-In-Focus: Correlation of monitoring data

The feature in focus for New Relic as an NGINX monitoring tool is the correlation of monitoring data. This feature focuses on how New Relic brings together metrics, logs, and traces from NGINX into a single platform for unified analysis. The key benefit is that it gives you the power to quickly identify the root cause of NGINX performance issues.

Why do we recommend New Relic?

We recommend New Relic for monitoring NGINX because it offers a mature, production-ready monitoring ecosystem widely used in modern DevOps environments. The platform offers prebuilt integrations, automated instrumentation, and scalable data collection.

In addition to that, New Relic has been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, which reflects its strong capabilities in the observability space.

Who is New Relic recommended for?

New Relic is recommended for DevOps teams, site reliability engineers (SREs), cloud platform teams, and software engineers responsible for maintaining the performance and reliability of modern applications. Roles like these often need visibility into how infrastructure, services, and applications behave in production environments

New Relic uses a transparent usage-based pricing model. The pricing model is mainly based on data usage, user types, and advanced compute features (such as AI or Live Archives). However, you can control spending by turning specific capabilities on or off using the platform’s feature control tools.

There are three main paid plans: Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. The Standard plan is for small teams and includes up to five Full Platform users, unlimited Basic users, standard data retention, and the free 100 GB monthly data allowance. The Pro plan targets growing teams and includes unlimited Full Platform users, SAML single sign-on (SSO) for authentication, extended data retention, and additional administrative controls.

The Enterprise plan is for larger organizations and provides unlimited Full Platform users, advanced security, and compliance features. It also comes with 24/7 dedicated support and enhanced security capabilities. These plans allow you to scale their observability platform as your monitoring needs and infrastructure grow.

There is also a perpetual free tier that includes 100 GB of data ingested per month, automatic log obfuscation, one full platform user, and unlimited basic users.

Choosing an NGINX Monitoring Tool

Solutions like ManageEngine, and Dynatrace give you visibility over NGINX performance and equip you with high-quality visualization options and alerts you can use to make sure you don’t miss anything important.

Our methodology for choosing the best NGINX monitoring tools

We evaluated tools across several key areas to ensure they provide comprehensive, actionable insights for your organization: NGINX-specific monitoring capabilities: We evaluated tools based on their ability to collect key NGINX metrics, including request rates, active connections, response times, and error rates.

• Real-time performance visibility: We gave preference to tools that provide real-time monitoring, dashboards, and analytics to help teams quickly detect performance issues.
• Alerting and incident response: Solutions were assessed for their ability to generate alerts and notifications when performance thresholds or anomalies occur.
• Log monitoring and analysis: Preference was given to tools that can collect and analyze NGINX access and error logs for deeper troubleshooting.
• Integration with broader infrastructure monitoring: We considered whether the tool can monitor NGINX alongside applications, servers, containers, and cloud services.
• Ease of deployment and configuration: We also considered tools based on how easy they are to deploy, configure, and maintain in production environments.
• Scalability and performance: We selected tools that scale effectively for monitoring multiple NGINX instances across distributed environments.
• Pricing, licensing, and accessibility: Both open-source and commercial tools were considered, with attention to transparent pricing, free tiers, and enterprise support options.

Broader B2B Software Selection Methodology

We evaluate B2B software using a consistent, objective framework that focuses on how well a product solves meaningful business problems at a justified cost. This includes assessing overall performance, scalability, stability, and the quality of the user experience. We examine real-world feedback from practitioners to understand how the software behaves outside of controlled demos.

We also review vendor transparency, roadmap clarity, support responsiveness, and the pace at which meaningful improvements are released. We follow this approach to ensure each of our recommendations is grounded in practical value, long-term viability, and operational impact, not in marketing claims.

Check out our detailed B2B software methodology page to learn more.

Why Trust Us?

Our work is produced by a team of IT and business software professionals with extensive hands-on experience evaluating, deploying, and managing enterprise technology. We analyze software independently, using evidence-based methods and industry best practices to ensure our assessments remain unbiased and technically sound.

Our goal is to provide you with clear, reliable insights that help reduce risk, shorten evaluation cycles, and support confident decision-making when selecting complex business technology.

NGINX Monitoring FAQs