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Nginx Troubleshooting
Nginx Troubleshooting

Nginx Troubleshooting: Investigate and solve problems with Nginx-powered websites using a deep understanding of the underlying principles

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Profile Icon Alexey Kapranov
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Paperback Apr 2016 172 pages 1st Edition
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Alexey Kapranov
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€18.99 per month
Paperback Apr 2016 172 pages 1st Edition
eBook
€13.98 €19.99
Paperback
€24.99
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Free Trial
Renews at €18.99p/m
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€13.98 €19.99
Paperback
€24.99
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Renews at €18.99p/m

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Nginx Troubleshooting

Chapter 2. Searching for Problems in Log Files

Nginx really is a breakthrough technology powering a great part of modern Web. And as with all great technologies, it stands on the shoulders of giants. Nginx would not be possible without Apache. One very important Unix tradition that Nginx embraces fully is thorough logging.

Logs are what you turn to the moment there is a problem with your Nginx instance. For a daemon, there are not really many ways to communicate its state to the administrator in a simple, reliable, and guaranteed to work way other than logs.

You will find the following topics in this chapter:

  • A comprehensive description of how Nginx logging is configured and what mistakes could be made in the configuration
  • A special section on how to log POST request bodies
  • A section on how log rotation works and why there is some potential for problems
  • A series of real-life error records from logs with analysis

Configuring Nginx logging

There are two types of logs that Nginx may write. One could also say that there are infinite types because of the log_format directive that allows you to create your own types of logs.

To refresh your memory about what directives are used to configure Nginx logging, here they are:

  • The error_log directive configures the logging of exceptional events that the developers of Nginx consider worth noting. Usually, this is all kinds of errors.

    The format of the directive is this:

    error_log <destination> <log level>;

    Note

    The first parameter is usually a path to the file with the log. Recent versions of Nginx starting with 1.7.1 also support logging via syslog, to a local or remote syslog server. There is also a rarely used misnamed special value stderr, which, by the way, does not redirect logging to stderr (the third standard stdio stream or &2 in shell terms) because it does not make much sense to log to stderr from a daemon—daemonization involves...

Creating infrastructure around logs

Okay, let's do some arithmetic. Suppose that you have a rather popular but not on a world scale (yet) website with about 50,000 visits per day. This is a number that managers brag about during their meetups; they get it from some analytics software. It almost means nothing regarding your job. Because what is a visit? Let's say that what you have is an e-commerce site; you sell some nonseasonal stuff, for example, power tools. Your average visitor will look at one to two pages with spikes to early tens when actually choosing and buying something. Let it be three pages per visit on average. What is a page? For you, it is a series of HTTP responses—the main document and all the embedded objects. People notoriously underestimate the sheer size of modern web pages. It would be a safe bet to say that your pages include on average 100 objects (HTML documents, images, scripts, style sheets, and so on) amounting to the size of over a megabyte...

Summary

In this chapter, we refreshed our knowledge of how logging works in Nginx. There are two types of logs; one of them may be infinitely extended, whereas the other is hard to parse by scripts because it does not have enough structure.

We spent some time on special topics, such as log rotation and logging POST request bodies (with a small test stand that we created step by step in the chapter, no less).

We also analyzed several error records from some real error logs.

The next chapter will have more actual problems analyzed and troubleshot. We will present several cases of actual problems that people had with read Nginx installations and try to debug them from the ground up.

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Key benefits

  • • Solve problems with your Nginx-powered websites before your audience notices anything
  • • Peek into the Nginx architecture and gain knowledge that will help you be valuable to you in the long run
  • • Gain knowledge of different types of problems in a step-by-step way

Description

Nginx is clearly winning the race to be the dominant software to power modern websites. It is fast and open source, maintained with passion by a brilliant team. This book will help you maintain your Nginx instances in a healthy and predictable state. It will lead you through all the types of problems you might encounter as a web administrator, with a special focus on performance and migration from older software. You will learn how to write good configuration files and will get good insights into Nginx logs. It will provide you solutions to problems such as missing or broken functionality and also show you how to tackle performance issues with the Nginx server. A special chapter is devoted to the art of prevention, that is, monitoring and alerting services you may use to detect problems before they manifest themselves on a big scale. The books ends with a reference to error and warning messages Nginx could emit to help you during incident investigations.

Who is this book for?

The book is for technical specialists who already use Nginx to serve web pages for their users. Whether you are an experienced system administrator or a new professional, this book will help you do your job in the most efficient way.

What you will learn

  • • Detect and investigate problems with your web servers
  • • Create correct and professional configuration files
  • • Get an in-depth understanding of the web server software
  • • Interpret Nginx log files easily and with actionable insights
  • • Make your websites respond as fast as possible
  • • Prevent problems by setting up proper monitoring and alerts

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Apr 22, 2016
Length: 172 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785288654
Vendor :
Nginx
Languages :
Concepts :
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : Apr 22, 2016
Length: 172 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785288654
Vendor :
Nginx
Languages :
Concepts :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
1. Searching for Problems in Nginx Configuration Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Searching for Problems in Log Files Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Troubleshooting Functionality Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Optimizing Website Performance Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Troubleshooting Rare Specific Problems Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Monitoring Nginx Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Going Forward with Nginx Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A. Rare Nginx Error Messages Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
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