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Connect Akto with NGINX
If your API calls are being routed through NGINX, you can use Akto's NGINX module to send traffic to Akto dashboard. Below guide will help you do this:
1. Go to Quick Start on your Akto dashboard and expand the
Connect traffic data section.
2. Scroll down to
Data processors setup section.
3. Copy the
policy json and click on the Akto Dashboard role link.
4.
Click on the JSON tab and paste the policy
5. Click on
Review policy button.
6. Enter
AktoDashboardPolicy as the policy name and click on Create Policy button
8. Once the policy is created, go back to the
dashboard.1. Click on
Setup traffic processors button.2. This will bring up infra that will process your traffic.
3. Check that you have
AKTO_NLB and AKTO_MONGO_IP vars once setup is complete.This methods is recommended when you have end to end TLS and SSL termination happens at NGINX.
- 1.Record all API calls using
nginx-module-njs. (njs is a standard NGINX module built and shipped in every release of NGINX). You can install it by runningapt install nginx-module-njs - 2.The data is sent to Akto installed in your VPC using nginx-kafka-log-module. You can install it by using nginx dynamic modules functionality as described here
- 3.
- 4.In your NGINX conf file -
/etc/nginx/nginx.conf, add the following:
load_module /usr/lib/nginx/modules/ngx_http_js_module.so;
load_module /usr/lib/nginx/modules/ngx_http_kafka_log_module.so;
add the following lines in
http section of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:subrequest_output_buffer_size 8k;
js_path "/etc/nginx/njs/";
js_var $responseBo "{}";
js_import main2 from api_log.js;
kafka_log_kafka_brokers <AKTO_NLB_IP>:9092;
kafka_log_kafka_buffer_max_messages 100000;
5. In
/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf, add 2 lines in server > location sectionserver {
location / {
.....
js_body_filter main2.to_lower_case;
kafka_log kafka:akto.api.logs $responseBo;
}
}
6. Restart NGINX by
nginx -s reload. This will start logging all the request-response logs to akto.Note: We have benchmarked an nginx server with and without akto nginx traffic module. The results for the same are as follows:
metrics | vanilla nginx | nginx with akto module |
|---|---|---|
avg. cpu usage | upto 36% | upto 38% |
avg. memory usage | 0.5% | 0.5% |
The server setup being used is an AWS EC2 (t3a.small: 2CPU + 2GB RAM), with around 1600-1800 requests being fired per second to the server continuously for over a minute (~110k requests per minute). Here nginx is configured as a reverse proxy to a node.js backend server.
Last modified 2mo ago