NGINX Controller, a centralized monitoring and management platform for NGINX Plus instances, has now reached general availability. It is part of NGINX Application Platform, a set of enterprise products from NGINX.
At its core, the purpose of NGINX Controller is to manage NGINX Plus servers through a multi-cloud environment. It allows you to do this by providing a user interface for creating and configuring instances of NGINX Plus, whilst also providing monitoring and alerting capabilities for them.
Sidney Rabsatt, vice president of Product Management at NGINX, explains the problems that the product aims to solve:
Prior to Controller, customers built their own custom tooling to manage and monitor. This introduced a layer of complexity that Controller now solves, as an easy-to-use tool optimised for NGINX. It will save time, reduce complexity, and lower the cost of supporting customer-facing applications.
Some of the key features of NGINX Controller include:
- Monitoring: A user interface provides graphs of useful metrics such as RPS and bandwidth usage.
- Alerting: Alerts on metrics such as CPU, HTTP status code errors and more.
- Dashboarding: A customizable, aggregated view of metrics across many instances.
- Configuration analyzer: Analyzes the configuration of instances and recommends improvements.
- Simplified configuration management: A user interface for simplifying the configuration workflow of instances.
- Policy-driven management: Environment specific policies can now be generated to suit specific lines of business
NGINX Controller also provides an API, meaning that it can be integrated with third-party monitoring tools.
A core focus of NGINX Controller is analytics. Anomaly detection aims to be as quick and reliable a possible, in order for it to be easy to identify any performance issues. By working together with the management aspect of the tool, appropriate configuration changes aim to be as straightforward as possible to apply, mitigating any detected issues.
Intent-based policy management is also an aim of the tool. This means that users of the controller will be able to declare the sort of service level agreement they have (for example, 99th percentile availability), and the appropriate instances and configuration will be deployed and configured.
Over time NGINX intends on rolling out more features based on customer feedback. A free trial can be found online, and a video is also available giving an overview of the product.
