Installing Netdata on GridPane

Installing Netdata

This part is easy, once you sign up for Netdata. You’ll be given a command to run via SSH as root

Enabling Nginx Monitoring

To be able to monitor Nginx, there are some added steps.

Step 1 – Enable stub_status page

You will need to enable the stub_status module on your system. GridPane has this configuration in /etc/nginx/sites-available/222222 but I don’t know what it’s for? It’s not enabled.

So you can simply just create a new file under /etc/nginx/sites-available called nginx_status and add the contents below.

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

Why two locations? The /stub_status is for Netdata, and the /nginx_status is for Nginx amplify. It all depends on what you want to use. I included both.

You then want to enable the site!

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/nginx_status /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/nginx_status

Double-check your syntax is correct by running nginx -t

❯ nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Now you can restart Nginx

systemctl restart nginx

Step 2 – Configure NetData (optional)

If you used the Nginx configuration I mentioned, then you don’t need to do anything. Netdata will work out of the box.

However, I’m pretty sure GridPane will wipe this configuration and eventually provide stub_status using a custom URL. If so then follow this step.

Open up the Netdata config for Nginx

cd /etc/netdata
./edit-config python.d/nginx.conf

Go to the bottom of the file and add the following.

gridpane:
  name : 'gridpane'
  url  : 'http://localhost:222222/nginx_status'

The URL portion is where the stub_status is exposed.