8 ms·

Show HN: Top, but for Nginx

219 points by squiguy7 6y ago

eterps 6y ago
I wouldn't mind a screenshot before installing it.
- theblackcat1002 6y ago
  It seems to be a rewrite of ngxtop https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop
  - dazzawazza 6y ago
    It does seem to be that except it doesn't "tail log files" like the original (see limitations at the bottom if the readme.
- fb03 6y ago
  I thought the same thing. I was expecting to see some kind of screenshot so I could have a glimpse of the software. EDIT: 1# I'm gonna compile it and provide a screenshot via a pull request. 2# Compilation failed because it needed sqlite3 headers and this is not reported in the app. I'm gonna edit that in the readme too :) This year (specially with the whole covid thingy) I set a goal to contribute more to open source. I'm trying to find every little issue I can find and contribute to :P
  - squiguy7 6y ago
    Thanks for submitting a patch! I have been throwing around the idea of using the "bundled" feature flag listed here: https://github.com/rusqlite/rusqlite#optional-features https://github.com/rusqlite/rusqlite#optional-features. I was hesitant to initially because it would force users to have a specific version of SQLite.
    - fb03 6y ago
      https://github.com/gsquire/topngx/pull/1 https://github.com/gsquire/topngx/pull/1 o/
- squiguy7 6y ago
  I can work on adding that into the README now.
jrumbut 6y ago
This is the tool I've wanted (and half written 3-4 times) my whole career. From reading the github it looks lightweight, not a big infrastructure addition, and that it helps you figure out wtf is going on with the web server. Regarding the branding, for me top is a real-time tool rather than a logging tool. I was picturing something that may have been more useful for older style Apache httpd installs where you have several virtual hosts on a server and you'd want to know who is hogging the resources or causing the problems.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- squiguy7 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I wanted to capture the same idea as the original tool I listed in the README. In the future I hope to add functionality to tail a log file in real time and do live updates of the stats. This is where the idea of top comes from.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- markstos 6y ago
  Agreed. The defining feature of `top` is that it updates in real time.
- jluxenberg 6y ago
  Pro tip: you can make any command into a real-time one with `watch`: watch bash -c "topngx < /path/to/access.log" Will run `topngx` against access.log every two seconds and display the output.
  - gregoriol 6y ago
    That's not "real time"! And definitely won't behave well if the processing takes more than 2 seconds (imagine log files of many millions rows)
gregoriol 6y ago
Maybe not as lightweight, but GoAccess (https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess) does an awesome job at parsing the logs and displaying statistics, works for nginx and other webservers too
- squiguy7 6y ago
  I hadn't heard of this tool but it looks much more complete! Thanks for sharing.
- guanzo 6y ago
  Goaccess used to work perfectly, but recently when ever I try to run the real time HTML command, it exits without any error messages after ~2 million records. Maybe out of memory.. any ideas?
  - joshyi 6y ago
    Doubt very much that ~2M will be a memory issue (unless you got less than ~130MB). https://goaccess.io/faq#performance https://goaccess.io/faq#performance We're running v1.4 in production and it has been working pretty nice for us.
- mekster 6y ago
  Last time I tried it was a pain to set it up to keep up with log rotations and retain all the records.
  - joshyi 6y ago
    For us it was literately an `apt install goaccess`, picked the COMBINED log format and it's been running for over a month in prod without issues (rotating weekly). You should post the issue on their https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess, they may be able to help you.
deft 6y ago
How does this compare to goaccess? Similar tool that I've used briefly. One issue I had was how complicated it was, I'm assuming since this is nginx specific it's simpler.
jimjag 6y ago
Hmmm... looks like nothing more than a weblog analyzer. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. It's not "real time" since it can only report on what the web-server has done not what it is doing. AFAIK, nginx has nothing like Apache httpd's mod_status... at least, nothing open source.
- mrits 6y ago
  the latency between weblog and web server is a lot more real time than most things
- oefrha 6y ago
  Open source nginx has stub_status. It's just not very (very not) featureful. https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.html https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.h...
- dijital 6y ago
  If you're in a Kubernetes environment, the NGINX Ingress Controller has a pretty decent set of realtime metrics: https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/monitoring/ https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/monito... Which presumably means those metrics are available in the OSS edition somehow...
- cholmon 6y ago
  What frustrates me about Apache's mod_status is that it's powered by a normal request handler. If all the child workers are busy, your request for a status report will timeout, even if you're running it locally from the command line. Not super helpful when you're troubleshooting in real time. Anyone know if there's a "deeper" way to get the same stats info about what Apache is doing without having to basically wait in line with all the other incoming requests?
maxmalysh 6y ago
Monitoring capabilities are missing from Nginx on purpose. They are not and will never be available for free because there is "NGINX Plus". This is why I recommend switching to HAProxy.
- cinericius 6y ago
  HAProxy also has an 'enterprise' offering[1], what makes this different from nginx plus? [1] https://www.haproxy.com/products/haproxy-enterprise-edition/ https://www.haproxy.com/products/haproxy-enterprise-edition/
  - sciurus 6y ago
    Haproxy's full monitoring capabilities are available in the open source version. Nginx's are not. The stub_status module is very limited. Compare https://www.haproxy.com/blog/exploring-the-haproxy-stats-page/ https://www.haproxy.com/blog/exploring-the-haproxy-stats-pag... with https://nginx.org/libxslt/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.html https://nginx.org/libxslt/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_...
    - cyberpunk 6y ago
      What exactly do you need to monitor on your nginxes? We collect logs, scrape metrics from the nginx pods and... that's enough..
- shockinglytrue 6y ago
  Wish all distros shipped https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts by default. It's a minor pain to self-build
  - throwaway888abc 6y ago
    This is cool!
  - rcostin2k2 6y ago
hk__2 6y ago
> This tool is a rewrite of ngxtop to make it more easily installed and hopefully quicker. Why make a whole new tool with limitations instead of improving the existing one?
- ccmcarey 6y ago
  Original maintainers of a project probably wouldn't just accept a PR of a complete rewrite.
- kreetx 6y ago
  Might also be an exercise in learning.
dheera 6y ago
Interesting, but I would have thought "top" for nginx would be a tool that shows you all the connections, paths, and resource usage live, like the "top" command. Is there a tool that does that?
madsmtm 6y ago
I made something similar in Python [0], but for parsing the error_log directive. Just for the odd time you need to parse that. [0] https://github.com/madsmtm/nginx-error-log https://github.com/madsmtm/nginx-error-log
randomstring 6y ago
My last company had something like that and included response time percentiles (50th, 90th, 95th, 99th) and we had these values graphed and displayed on a big screen in our office. Along with a ton of other performance stats: queries per second, various measures of system load, etc. Averages can lie, especially when something like an empty query can take close to zero time compared to a non-trivial transaction. If some robot or other artifact of your site is generating a some amount of null queries that will make your average response time look better than it actually is. Percentiles, particularly on the tail of 90th or above, tell a better story of how well and consistently you're responding to traffic under load.
- harpratap 6y ago
  How "recent" are your percentiles? I have found that calculating percentiles is a pretty CPU heavy task. And you if you have a giant Grafana querying every 30s it can stress out your prometheus/graphite whatever. But if you take small data size, like 95th percentile of latencies in the last 2minutes, it's not really a very accurate representation either. And ofcourse there is another problem of correctly storing all your latencies accurately which becomes pretty hard if you are using something like prometheus.
superkuh 6y ago
>a rewrite of ngxtop to make it more easily installed and hopefully quicker. What world does this guy live in that a program in Rust is easier to get running on any random machine than python script?
- Kaze404 6y ago
  I've never had issues shipping Rust binaries to people, unlike in Python where they usually have to install dependencies.
- jblarneyforward 6y ago
  I had the vague sense that it was as easy to cross-compile rust binaries as it is for go. Distributing single binary would be easier, but `cargo install xyz` seems harder than python script
- squiguy7 6y ago
  I made a new GitHub release with binaries for Mac and Linux pretty recently. In this sense, you can just download the binary and get up and running.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

219 points by squiguy7 6y ago

eterps 6y ago

I wouldn't mind a screenshot before installing it.

theblackcat1002 6y ago
It seems to be a rewrite of ngxtop https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop
- dazzawazza 6y ago
  It does seem to be that except it doesn't "tail log files" like the original (see limitations at the bottom if the readme.
fb03 6y ago
I thought the same thing. I was expecting to see some kind of screenshot so I could have a glimpse of the software. EDIT: 1# I'm gonna compile it and provide a screenshot via a pull request. 2# Compilation failed because it needed sqlite3 headers and this is not reported in the app. I'm gonna edit that in the readme too :) This year (specially with the whole covid thingy) I set a goal to contribute more to open source. I'm trying to find every little issue I can find and contribute to :P
- squiguy7 6y ago
  Thanks for submitting a patch! I have been throwing around the idea of using the "bundled" feature flag listed here: https://github.com/rusqlite/rusqlite#optional-features https://github.com/rusqlite/rusqlite#optional-features. I was hesitant to initially because it would force users to have a specific version of SQLite.
  - fb03 6y ago
    https://github.com/gsquire/topngx/pull/1 https://github.com/gsquire/topngx/pull/1 o/
squiguy7 6y ago
I can work on adding that into the README now.

jrumbut 6y ago

This is the tool I've wanted (and half written 3-4 times) my whole career. From reading the github it looks lightweight, not a big infrastructure addition, and that it helps you figure out wtf is going on with the web server. Regarding the branding, for me top is a real-time tool rather than a logging tool. I was picturing something that may have been more useful for older style Apache httpd installs where you have several virtual hosts on a server and you'd want to know who is hogging the resources or causing the problems.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
squiguy7 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I wanted to capture the same idea as the original tool I listed in the README. In the future I hope to add functionality to tail a log file in real time and do live updates of the stats. This is where the idea of top comes from.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
markstos 6y ago
Agreed. The defining feature of `top` is that it updates in real time.
jluxenberg 6y ago
Pro tip: you can make any command into a real-time one with `watch`: watch bash -c "topngx < /path/to/access.log" Will run `topngx` against access.log every two seconds and display the output.
- gregoriol 6y ago
  That's not "real time"! And definitely won't behave well if the processing takes more than 2 seconds (imagine log files of many millions rows)

gregoriol 6y ago

Maybe not as lightweight, but GoAccess (https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess) does an awesome job at parsing the logs and displaying statistics, works for nginx and other webservers too

squiguy7 6y ago
I hadn't heard of this tool but it looks much more complete! Thanks for sharing.
guanzo 6y ago
Goaccess used to work perfectly, but recently when ever I try to run the real time HTML command, it exits without any error messages after ~2 million records. Maybe out of memory.. any ideas?
- joshyi 6y ago
  Doubt very much that ~2M will be a memory issue (unless you got less than ~130MB). https://goaccess.io/faq#performance https://goaccess.io/faq#performance We're running v1.4 in production and it has been working pretty nice for us.
mekster 6y ago
Last time I tried it was a pain to set it up to keep up with log rotations and retain all the records.
- joshyi 6y ago
  For us it was literately an `apt install goaccess`, picked the COMBINED log format and it's been running for over a month in prod without issues (rotating weekly). You should post the issue on their https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess, they may be able to help you.

deft 6y ago

How does this compare to goaccess? Similar tool that I've used briefly. One issue I had was how complicated it was, I'm assuming since this is nginx specific it's simpler.

jimjag 6y ago

Hmmm... looks like nothing more than a weblog analyzer. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. It's not "real time" since it can only report on what the web-server has done not what it is doing. AFAIK, nginx has nothing like Apache httpd's mod_status... at least, nothing open source.

mrits 6y ago
the latency between weblog and web server is a lot more real time than most things
oefrha 6y ago
Open source nginx has stub_status. It's just not very (very not) featureful. https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.html https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.h...
dijital 6y ago
If you're in a Kubernetes environment, the NGINX Ingress Controller has a pretty decent set of realtime metrics: https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/monitoring/ https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/monito... Which presumably means those metrics are available in the OSS edition somehow...
cholmon 6y ago
What frustrates me about Apache's mod_status is that it's powered by a normal request handler. If all the child workers are busy, your request for a status report will timeout, even if you're running it locally from the command line. Not super helpful when you're troubleshooting in real time. Anyone know if there's a "deeper" way to get the same stats info about what Apache is doing without having to basically wait in line with all the other incoming requests?

maxmalysh 6y ago

Monitoring capabilities are missing from Nginx on purpose. They are not and will never be available for free because there is "NGINX Plus". This is why I recommend switching to HAProxy.

cinericius 6y ago
HAProxy also has an 'enterprise' offering[1], what makes this different from nginx plus? [1] https://www.haproxy.com/products/haproxy-enterprise-edition/ https://www.haproxy.com/products/haproxy-enterprise-edition/
- sciurus 6y ago
  Haproxy's full monitoring capabilities are available in the open source version. Nginx's are not. The stub_status module is very limited. Compare https://www.haproxy.com/blog/exploring-the-haproxy-stats-page/ https://www.haproxy.com/blog/exploring-the-haproxy-stats-pag... with https://nginx.org/libxslt/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.html https://nginx.org/libxslt/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_...
  - cyberpunk 6y ago
    What exactly do you need to monitor on your nginxes? We collect logs, scrape metrics from the nginx pods and... that's enough..
shockinglytrue 6y ago
Wish all distros shipped https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts by default. It's a minor pain to self-build
- throwaway888abc 6y ago
  This is cool!
- rcostin2k2 6y ago

hk__2 6y ago

> This tool is a rewrite of ngxtop to make it more easily installed and hopefully quicker. Why make a whole new tool with limitations instead of improving the existing one?

ccmcarey 6y ago
Original maintainers of a project probably wouldn't just accept a PR of a complete rewrite.
kreetx 6y ago
Might also be an exercise in learning.

dheera 6y ago

Interesting, but I would have thought "top" for nginx would be a tool that shows you all the connections, paths, and resource usage live, like the "top" command. Is there a tool that does that?

madsmtm 6y ago

I made something similar in Python [0], but for parsing the error_log directive. Just for the odd time you need to parse that. [0] https://github.com/madsmtm/nginx-error-log https://github.com/madsmtm/nginx-error-log

randomstring 6y ago

My last company had something like that and included response time percentiles (50th, 90th, 95th, 99th) and we had these values graphed and displayed on a big screen in our office. Along with a ton of other performance stats: queries per second, various measures of system load, etc. Averages can lie, especially when something like an empty query can take close to zero time compared to a non-trivial transaction. If some robot or other artifact of your site is generating a some amount of null queries that will make your average response time look better than it actually is. Percentiles, particularly on the tail of 90th or above, tell a better story of how well and consistently you're responding to traffic under load.

harpratap 6y ago
How "recent" are your percentiles? I have found that calculating percentiles is a pretty CPU heavy task. And you if you have a giant Grafana querying every 30s it can stress out your prometheus/graphite whatever. But if you take small data size, like 95th percentile of latencies in the last 2minutes, it's not really a very accurate representation either. And ofcourse there is another problem of correctly storing all your latencies accurately which becomes pretty hard if you are using something like prometheus.

superkuh 6y ago

>a rewrite of ngxtop to make it more easily installed and hopefully quicker. What world does this guy live in that a program in Rust is easier to get running on any random machine than python script?

Kaze404 6y ago
I've never had issues shipping Rust binaries to people, unlike in Python where they usually have to install dependencies.
jblarneyforward 6y ago
I had the vague sense that it was as easy to cross-compile rust binaries as it is for go. Distributing single binary would be easier, but `cargo install xyz` seems harder than python script
squiguy7 6y ago
I made a new GitHub release with binaries for Mac and Linux pretty recently. In this sense, you can just download the binary and get up and running.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]