The Stub status module was designed to provide information about the current state of the server, such as the amount of active connections, the total handled requests, and more. To activate it, place the stub_status directive in a location block. All requests matching the location block will produce the status page:
location = /nginx_status {
stub_status on;
allow 127.0.0.1; # you may want to protect the information
deny all;
}
This module is not included in the default Nginx build.
An example result produced by Nginx:
Active connections: 1 server accepts handled requests 10 10 23 Reading: 0 Writing: 1 Waiting: 0
It's interesting to note that there are several server monitoring solutions, such as Monitorix, that offer Nginx support through the Stub status page by calling it at regular intervals and parsing the statistics.