As a system administrator, you will need to monitor your containers for a wide array of reasons. Between analyzing the health of your containers, avoiding resource constraints, and collecting, parsing, and visualizing data, one could easily get lost.

Many companies are moving their infrastructure and web applications to the cloud. Along with moving to the cloud, organizations are finding new ways to remain agile and nimble, especially when it comes to software. By utilizing Amazon AWS and Amazon ECS, companies are decoupling their monolithic applications and taking advantage of microservice architecture.

In part 2 of our AWS S3 Monitoring series, we covered the basics of AWS S3 logging, why it’s important to log all the information in your cloud environment, and also the benefits of monitoring those logs.

Amazon Simple Storage Service, widely known as Amazon S3, is a highly scalable, fast, and durable solution for object-level storage of any data type. Unlike the operating systems we are all used to, Amazon S3 does not store files in a file system, instead it stores files as objects. Object Storage allows users to upload files, videos, and documents like you were to upload files, videos, and documents to popular cloud storage products like Dropbox and Google Drive. This makes Amazon S3 very flexible and platform agnostic.

If you’re just joining us, I highly advise you to go back and check out our first two parts of this three part series regarding NGINX and Sumo Logic where we go over a basic Introduction to NGNIX and also Touch Up On NGINX, Logs, and Why Logs Are Important. If you’ve been following along, then great, let’s jump right into it.

In part one of our introduction to NGINX “What is NGINX” , we went over the basic history of NGINX, the difference between Apache and NGINX, and why you would use NGINX over Apache in certain environments and web applications. Today we’ll be diving deeper into NGINX and going over topics such as web server performance, monitoring said performance, how to obtain and archive logs for deeper analysis, and how to even tell which web server you’re running on your environment.

Today we will be covering NGINX, an open source software web server and main alternative/competitor to Apache HTTP Server. NGINX has been gaining in popularity since its inception and is used across a wide spectrum of applications for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and much more.

In order to effectively manage and monitor your infrastructure, a web admin needs clear and transparent information about the types of activity going on within their servers. Server logs provide a documented footprint of all traffic and errors that occur within an environment. Apache has two main log files, Error Logs, and Access Logs.

Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source web server that delivers web content through the internet. It is commonly referred to as Apache and after development, it quickly became the most popular HTTP client on the web.