Why monitor the NGINX ingress controller?

The NGINX ingress controller exposes many useful metrics that can be scraped by a Prometheus server or agent. These metrics can inform you of ongoing process connections and the current ingress load that your system is handling. Furthermore, these metrics can inform you on ingress config reloads and empower alert conditions on config reload errors or unexpected config changes.

NGINX ingress controller quickstart highlights

• Config reload monitoring (errors and last successful reload)
• Throughput faceted by ingress classes
• Request/response insights on payload size and response time
• CPU and memory statistics
• This quickstart is based on metrics sent to New Relic using Prometheus Agent or Prometheus Server.

Monitoring NGINX ingress controller

The NGINX ingress controller has to have metrics enabled before they are available to be scraped. Instructions for ensuring your NGINX metrics are enabled can be found here: https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/monitoring/#wildcard-ingresses