Nginx OpenTelemetry Integration

Nginx is a high-performance web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer.

This integration collects Nginx telemetry through OpenTelemetry Collector receivers managed by Elastic Agent:

• Metrics (nginxreceiver.otel) — stub_status request count, accepted and handled connections, and current connections by state (active, reading, writing, waiting), scraped by the nginxreceiver
• Access logs (nginx.access.otel) — HTTP access log lines tailed by the filelogreceiver and parsed by a transform processor into fields such as http.request.method, http.response.status_code, url.original, url.path, source.address, network.protocol.version, and user_agent.name
• Error logs (nginx.error.otel) — error log lines tailed by the filelogreceiver, with multiline support, parsed into severity_text, process.pid, thread.id, and request details from the message (source.address, http.request.method)

Metrics and logs are stored with the native OTel schema — no field renaming or custom mapping is applied.

Once data starts flowing, the NGINX OpenTelemetry Assets package provides dashboards, alerting rule templates, and SLO templates.

This integration requires Nginx with the stub_status module enabled. It has been tested with Nginx 1.27 and Elastic Stack 9.4.0+.

You need Elasticsearch for storing and searching your data and Kibana for visualizing and managing it. You can use our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud, which is recommended, or self-manage the Elastic Stack on your own hardware.

The Elastic Agent (or EDOT Collector) must be able to reach the Nginx stub_status endpoint and read the access and error log files.

1. Enable stub_status in Nginx and confirm the endpoint is reachable from the agent host. For example:

   server {
       listen 80;
       server_name localhost;
       location /nginx_status {
           stub_status on;
           allow 127.0.0.1;
           deny all;
       }
   }
   		

2. Confirm the agent can read the access and error log files (typically /var/log/nginx/access.log and /var/log/nginx/error.log).

3. Add the integration in Kibana:

   • Go to Management → Integrations → search for "Nginx (OpenTelemetry)"
   • Click Add Nginx (OpenTelemetry)
   • Set Nginx Status Endpoint to your stub_status URL
   • Confirm the access and error log paths match your host
   • Set Timezone on error logs to the Nginx host IANA zone if it is not UTC (error timestamps have no offset)

In Discover:

• Metrics: data_stream.dataset: "nginxreceiver.otel"
• Access logs: data_stream.dataset: "nginx.access.otel"
• Error logs: data_stream.dataset: "nginx.error.otel"