Book Image

Nginx Troubleshooting

By : Alexey Kapranov
Book Image

Nginx Troubleshooting

By: Alexey Kapranov

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Nginx Troubleshooting
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Rare Nginx Error Messages
Index

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