Tools: New Nginx Metrics And Logs Monitoring With Opentelemetry 2026

Posted on Mar 3

• Originally published at signoz.io

Nginx metrics and logs monitoring are important to ensure that Nginx is performing as expected and to identify and resolve problems quickly. In this tutorial, you will install OpenTelemetry Collector to collect Nginx metrics and logs and then send the collected data to SigNoz for monitoring and visualization.

If you want to jump straight into implementation, start with this pre-requisites section.

For large-scale web applications serving thousands of requests per second, it becomes necessary to have multiple backend servers. These backend servers eventually receive traffic through a load-balancing server that handles the request distribution as needed. This type of server is known as a reverse proxy server. In this article, we will learn about monitoring one of the most popular reverse proxy servers - NGINX.

NGINX is one of the most popular open-source reverse proxy servers in use today. It is widely used for hosting static frontend as a web server as well as for routing traffic to multiple backend servers by acting as a load balancer. At its core, NGINX is written in C++ and is quite modular in design. NGINX allows you to add plug-and-play modules for enhanced features like security and monitoring. Although NGINX is quite easy to set up initially, it has some complex parameters that need to be tweaked in order to achieve the best configuration for a high-traffic website. This makes it necessary to retrieve and observe metrics obtained from NGINX.

OpenTelemetry is a set of APIs, SDKs, libraries, and integrations aiming to standardize the generation, collection, and management of telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces). It is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and is the leading open-source project in the observability domain.

The data you collect with OpenTelemetry is vendor-agnostic and can be exported in many formats. Telemetry data has become critical in observing the state of distributed systems. With microservices and polyglot architectures, there was a need to have a global standard. OpenTelemetry aims to fill that space and is doing a great job at it thus far.

In this tutorial, you will use OpenTelemetry Collector to collect PostgreSQL metrics for performance monitoring.

OpenTelemetry Collector is a stand-alone service provided by OpenTelemetry. It can be used as a telemetry-processing system with a lot of flexible configurations to collect and manag

Source: Dev.to