Send nginx logs to google cloud logging from OVH VPS

Question

I have an OVH VPS with nginx server setup on it. I'm looking for a way to send nginx access and error logs to Google Cloud Logging service, but all info I could find was about sending logs from Google Cloud VMs. Is it even possible at this moment? I've tried also to find anything about sending syslog to GCP as a workaround but no luck too. Since my dotnet services succesfully send logs to GCP I suppose it should be possible. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

In GCP there is an integration with NGINX to collect connection metrics and access logs. There are some prerequisites that you need to accomplish before you start collecting logs from NGINX.

• You must install Ops Agent in your instance . The Ops Agent collects logs and metrics on Compute Engine instances, sending your logs to Cloud Logging and your metrics to Cloud Monitoring. If you are using a single VM on a Linux SO, you can install the agent with the following command:

  curl -sSO https://dl.google.com/cloudagents/add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh

sudo bash add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh --also-install

You can consult the details about the Ops Agent installation on this link

• You will need to configure your NGINX instance enabling the stub_status module in the nginx configuration file to set up a locally reachable URL, like the following example:

       http://www.example.com/status
  

If you don't have the stub_status module enabled, you can run the following command to enable it:

sudo tee /etc/nginx/conf.d/status.conf > /dev/null << EOF
    server {
    listen 80;
    server_name 127.0.0.1;
    location /status {
        stub_status on;
        access_log off;
        allow 127.0.0.1;
        deny all;
      }
    location / {
       root /dev/null;
     }
  }
EOF
sudo service nginx reload
curl http://127.0.0.1:80/status

Please note that: 127.0.0.1 can be replaced with the real server name, for example, server_name mynginx.domain.com.

All these steps are detailed in the following link, it is a guide to setup all the prerequisites before you start collecting logs from your NGINX deployment. Also, there is an example to configure your deployment