Using the Stub Status module

NGINX provides an introspection module that outputs certain statistics about how it is running. This module is called stub_status and is enabled with the --with-http_stub_status_module configure flag.

To see the statistics produced by this module, the stub_status directive needs to be set to on. A separate location directive should be created for this module so that an ACL may be applied:

location /nginx_status {

    stub_status on;

    access_log off;

    allow 127.0.0.1;

    deny all;

}

Calling this URI from the localhost (for example, with curl http://localhost/nginx_status) will show output similar to the following lines:

Active connections: 2532
server accepts handled requests
1476737983 1476737983 3553635810
Reading: 93 Writing: 13 Waiting: 2426

Here we see that there are 2,532 open connections, of which NGINX is currently reading the request header of 93, and 13 connections are in a state in which NGINX is either reading the request body, processing...