Nginx and ServiceNow Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Nginx plugin for Telegraf is designed to collect status metrics from Nginx web servers, providing real-time insights into server operation metrics.

This output plugin streams metrics from Telegraf directly to a ServiceNow MID Server via HTTP, leveraging the nowmetric serializer for efficient integration with ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence and Event Management.

Integration details

Nginx

This plugin gathers status metrics from Nginx. It utilizes the ngx_http_stub_status_module to collect basic metrics related to the server’s performance. The plugin provides valuable insights into active connections, requests handled, and the current state of various metrics. This real-time data is essential for monitoring web server performance and ensuring optimal operations. The configuration allows users to specify the URL for the Nginx status endpoint, set timeouts, and configure TLS settings if necessary.

ServiceNow

Telegraf can be used to send metric data directly to a ServiceNow MID Server REST endpoint. Metrics are formatted either using ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence (OI) format or JSONv2 format, enabling seamless integration with ServiceNow’s Event Management and Operational Intelligence platforms. The serializer batches metrics efficiently, reducing network overhead by minimizing the number of HTTP POST requests. This integration allows users to quickly leverage metrics in ServiceNow for enhanced observability, proactive incident management, and performance monitoring, with ServiceNow’s operational intelligence capabilities.

Configuration

Nginx

[[inputs.nginx]]
  ## An array of Nginx stub_status URI to gather stats.
  urls = ["http://localhost/server_status"]

  ## Optional TLS Config
  # tls_ca = "/etc/telegraf/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/etc/telegraf/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/etc/telegraf/key.pem"
  ## Use TLS but skip chain & host verification
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

  ## HTTP response timeout (default: 5s)
  response_timeout = "5s"

ServiceNow

[[outputs.http]]
  ## ServiceNow MID Server metrics endpoint
  url = "http://mid-server.example.com:9082/api/mid/sa/metrics"

  ## HTTP request method
  method = "POST"

  ## Basic Authentication credentials
  username = "evt.integration"
  password = "P@$$w0rd!"

  ## Data serialization format for ServiceNow
  data_format = "nowmetric"

  ## Metric format type: "oi" (default) or "jsonv2"
  nowmetric_format = "oi"

  ## HTTP Headers
  [outputs.http.headers]
    Content-Type = "application/json"
    Accept = "application/json"

  ## Optional timeout
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## TLS configuration options
  # tls_ca = "/etc/telegraf/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/etc/telegraf/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/etc/telegraf/key.pem"
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

Input and output integration examples

Nginx

1. Web Performance Monitoring: Use the Nginx plugin to gather performance metrics from various Nginx servers across your infrastructure. By visualizing these metrics in real-time dashboards, teams can track performance trends, identify bottlenecks, and enhance the user experience on their web applications. Implementing such monitoring allows businesses to proactively address performance issues before they impact end-users.

2. Load Balancer Monitoring: Integrate this plugin with your load balancers to track the performance of backend Nginx servers. By collecting statistics like ‘active connections’ and ‘requests handled’, your operations team can ensure that traffic is flowing optimally and that no single server is overwhelmed. This proactive approach to load balancing prevents service downtime and enhances user experience.

3. Automated Alerting Systems: Combine the Nginx plugin with alerting services to automatically notify your team when a server’s metrics exceed predefined thresholds. For instance, if the number of active connections is too high, the system can trigger alerts so that corrective actions can be taken immediately, thus maintaining service quality and reliability.

4. Historical Data Analysis: Store the metrics collected by the Nginx plugin in a time-series database to analyze historical performance trends. This analysis can uncover periods of high traffic or poor performance, allowing for data-driven decisions about infrastructure scaling and optimization. By understanding past trends, organizations can better prepare for future demands.

ServiceNow

1. Proactive Incident Management: Utilize the Telegraf and ServiceNow integration to stream infrastructure and application metrics in real-time to ServiceNow Event Management. Automatically trigger incidents or remediation workflows based on thresholds, significantly reducing incident detection and response times.

2. End-to-End Application Monitoring: Deploy Telegraf agents across multiple layers of an application stack, sending performance metrics directly into ServiceNow. Leveraging ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence, teams can correlate metrics across components, quickly identifying performance bottlenecks.

3. Dynamic CI Performance Tracking: Integrate Telegraf metrics with ServiceNow’s CMDB by using this plugin to push performance data, allowing automatic updates of Configuration Item (CI) health states based on live metrics. This ensures an accurate and current state of infrastructure health in ServiceNow.

4. Cloud Resource Optimization: Collect metrics from hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures using Telegraf, streaming directly to ServiceNow. Leverage these metrics for real-time analytics, predictive capacity planning, and resource optimization, enabling proactive management and reduced operational costs.

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