Installing a log parser
While Nginx has great logs, at some of the higher levels of logging, they can also be quite exhaustive in the amount of information they log. A good way to not miss information and get a high level overview of what is going on with Nginx is to install a log parser that can aggregate information and display it in a more approachable format.
Note
One open source tool we can use for this is called GoAccess, and can be found on their website at https://goaccess.io/.
The good thing about GoAccess, aside from being free and open source, is that it can be accessed through both the Terminal and your browser. Therefore, it can function as both a monitoring tool that you run in your Terminal and as a reporting tool that generates a kind of dashboard for your stats:
To get started and install GoAccess, you can either check your distribution package manager or download and compile it manually:
wget http://tar.goaccess.io/goaccess-1.2.tar.gz
tar -xzvf goaccess-1.2.tar.gz
cd goaccess...