An Update on Monitoring NGINX with Amplify

An Update on Monitoring NGINX with Amplify

It’s been four months since we launched the private beta of NGINX Amplify, so we wanted to provide a short update about the service. For those who aren’t yet familiar with NGINX Amplify, it is a SaaS tool we created to natively monitor NGINX. Amplify also analyzes your NGINX configuration, and provides useful recommendations based on our years of collective experience with tuning, optimizing, and operating NGINX-powered sites.

We started NGINX Amplify with a team of just two developers. This small team put enormous effort into the early product which later became the foundation for the NGINX Amplify private beta program. A lot has happened since we launched the beta.

We have many enthusiastic users running the new service and providing their feedback and guidance on the direction of the product, for which we are truly grateful. They have told us that Amplify has helped them identify problematic services, pinpoint configuration issues, stay informed about obscure outages with their apps, and be generally much more aware of the state and behavior of their NGINX servers. Nothing is more exciting than knowing your product helps improve the performance and reliability of someone’s most important applications.

It wasn’t, of course, all without problems. We have received a lot of feedback on how we can improve the service as well. This is extremely important for us. There’s not a single product out there that couldn’t stand to be improved by input from a broad set of users. :) Knowing what isn’t working for our users and carefully analyzing critical feedback is a crucially important part of improving our products.

We have been very busy with further product development during the private beta. Issues with the agent software, the backend service, and the frontend user experience have been popping up and getting fixed. Quite a few beta users have provided useful observations about what went wrong with their particular setups; the vast diversity of NGINX deployments makes it extremely difficult to anticipate all possibilities.Their generous feedback has helped us improve Amplify overall and the configuration analysis tool in particular.

Despite the service being a private beta, we’ve done our best to provide the level of availability and reliability that customers expect of a production system. Thanks to our many years of experience in large-scale IT operations, we have succeeded during the beta period. We’ve also put serious effort into proactive customer support, and we are hoping it’s been of as much benefit to our users as it has been to us.

Since launching the beta, we have made a number of improvements and enhancements:

• The Amplify Agent software has been vastly improved, continuously incorporating bug fixes and new functionality.
• The Amplify Agent package is now provided for even more Linux distributions, including an experimental ebuild for Gentoo.
• The user interface has been getting friendlier, with some extra effort put into improving stability, performance, and the onboarding process as well.
• The work on the reporting capabilities continues, with the intention of offering even more proactive NGINX configuration insight pretty soon.

We believe that the NGINX Amplify private beta has thus far been a success. And we hope our beta users have been satisfied with the additional perspective Amplify has provided on their NGINX infrastructure.

We will continue to meticulously collect the most critical feedback and are already working on many features that have been requested by current NGINX Amplify users. One key area that many highlighted in particular is the ability to build graphs per virtual server and per URI. Spoiler alert – we’re working on it, so stay tuned!

Our intention is to offer NGINX Amplify to both the users of open source NGINX, and the customers who have been using NGINX Plus. We want it to be useful for everyone who has built a site or application with NGINX in mind (and on their servers!). NGINX Amplify is a native monitoring tool for NGINX, and it is our goal to make it an affordable and valuable NGINX-centric solution to help all of our users get the most out of NGINX!

It’s been an exciting journey for us. We are really thankful to everyone who has already tried NGINX Amplify, and we invite anyone who hasn’t signed up for the private beta yet to give it a try.

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