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Web Server Load Balancing with NGINX Plus

It’s been four months since we launched the private beta of NGINX Amplify, so we wanted to provide a short update about the service. For those who aren’t yet familiar with NGINX Amplify, it is a SaaS tool we created to natively monitor NGINX and NGINX Plus. NGINX Amplify also analyzes your NGINX configuration, and provides useful recommendations based on our years of collective experience with tuning, optimizing, and operating NGINX‑powered sites.

Editor – NGINX Amplify is now in public beta.

To learn more about NGINX Amplify and see a demo, watch our on‑demand webinar, Improve App Performance & Reliability with NGINX Amplify. And check out all the posts about NGINX Amplify on our blog.

Learning How You Monitor NGINX

We started NGINX Amplify with a team of just two developers. This small team put enormous effort into the early product which later became the foundation for the NGINX Amplify private beta program. A lot has happened since we launched the beta.

Amplify monitors NGINX for the response time of your upstream servers
Find overloaded upstream servers by monitoring response time

We have many enthusiastic users running the new service and providing their feedback and guidance on the direction of the product, for which we are truly grateful. They have told us how NGINX Amplify has helped them monitor NGINX – identifying problematic services, pinpointing configuration issues, keeping them informed about obscure outages with their apps, and generally making them much more aware of the state and behavior of their NGINX servers. Nothing is more exciting than knowing your product helps improve the performance and reliability of someone’s most important applications.

It wasn’t, of course, all without problems. We have received a lot of feedback on how we can improve the service as well. This is extremely important for us. There’s not a single product out there that couldn’t stand to be improved by input from a broad set of users. :) Knowing what isn’t working for our users and carefully analyzing critical feedback is a crucially important part of improving our products.

We have been very busy with further product development during the private beta. Issues with the agent software, the backend service, and the frontend user experience have been popping up and getting fixed. Quite a few beta users have provided useful observations about what went wrong with their particular setups; the vast diversity of NGINX deployments makes it extremely difficult to anticipate all possibilities. Their generous feedback has helped us improve NGINX Amplify overall and the configuration analysis tool in particular.

Set custom alerts with NGINX Amplify for monitoring NGINX
Get alerted when servers are overloaded

Despite the service being a private beta, we’ve done our best to provide the level of availability and reliability that customers expect of a production system. Thanks to our many years of experience in large‑scale IT operations, we have succeeded during the beta period. We’ve also put serious effort into proactive customer support, and we are hoping it’s been of as much benefit to our users as it has been to us.

Improving NGINX Amplify for Even Better NGINX Monitoring

Since launching the beta, we have made a number of improvements and enhancements:

  • The NGINX Amplify Agent software has been vastly improved, continuously incorporating bug fixes and new functionality.
  • The NGINX Amplify Agent package is now provided for even more Linux distributions, including an experimental ebuild for Gentoo.
  • The user interface has been getting friendlier, with some extra effort put into improving stability, performance, and the on‑boarding process as well.
  • The work on the reporting capabilities continues, with the intention of offering even more proactive NGINX configuration insight pretty soon.

We believe that the NGINX Amplify private beta has thus far been a success. And we hope our beta users have been satisfied with the additional perspective NGINX Amplify has provided as they monitor NGINX and their infrastructure.

We will continue to meticulously collect the most critical feedback and are already working on many features that have been requested by current NGINX Amplify users. One key area that many highlighted in particular is the ability to build graphs per virtual server and per URI. Spoiler alert – we’re working on it, so stay tuned!

Amplify provides configuration recomendations for optimal performance and security when monitoring with NGINX
Identify ways to improve your configuration for better performance, security, and reliability

Our intention is to offer NGINX Amplify to both the users of NGINX Open Source and the customers who have been using NGINX Plus. We want it to be useful for everyone who has built a site or application with NGINX in mind (and on their servers!). NGINX Amplify is a native tool for monitoring NGINX, and it is our goal to make it an affordable and valuable NGINX‑centric solution to help all of our users get the most out of NGINX!

It’s been an exciting journey for us. We are really thankful to everyone who has already tried monitoring NGINX with NGINX Amplify, and we invite anyone who hasn’t signed up for the private beta yet to give it a try.

Editor – NGINX Amplify is now in public beta.

To learn more about NGINX Amplify and see a demo, watch our on‑demand webinar, Improve App Performance & Reliability with NGINX Amplify. And check out all the posts about NGINX Amplify on our blog.

Monitoring Highly Dynamic and Distributed Systems with NGINX Amplify

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Overcome challenges in collecting logs and metrics and acting on the results.



About The Author

NGINX part of F5

F5 NGINX

F5 is the company behind the popular open source project, NGINX. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. Together with F5, NGINX solutions bridge the gap between NetOps and DevOps, with multi‑cloud application services that span from code to customer.

About F5 NGINX

F5, Inc. is the company behind NGINX, the popular open source project. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. Together with F5, our combined solution bridges the gap between NetOps and DevOps, with multi-cloud application services that span from code to customer.

Learn more at nginx.com or join the conversation by following @nginx on Twitter.