Implementing Nginx Operations Management with the Honghu Platform: A Practical Case Study

The article introduces the background of Nginx operations management, explains Yanhuang Data's need for a unified solution, and describes the Honghu platform as a cloud‑native, one‑stop data‑analysis system that supports heterogeneous data collection, storage, processing, and alerting.

Four data sources are used: Nginx access logs (unstructured time‑series text), Prometheus CPU metrics (structured time‑series), and CMDB mapping data (static relational data). The platform ingests these sources into a single dataset, defines custom data‑source types, and creates lookup tables for asset relationships.

Data parsing is performed via interactive token selection or manual regex editing, enabling field extraction without writing code. Parsed fields are then modeled using virtual views and materialized views to accelerate aggregation and support flexible filtering.

Visualization is achieved by building dashboards with multiple charts (HTTP traffic, PV, CPU usage, request methods, status codes, source distribution, etc.). Charts are linked for drill‑down interaction, and the dashboard can be shared or migrated.

Alerting is configured on derived fields, with custom trigger conditions, threshold settings, and webhook or email notifications. The article also shows how to integrate Honghu with Grafana and how to expose complex SQL logic as reusable table functions.

Finally, the article summarizes the outcomes—rapid end‑to‑end deployment, no programming required, seamless heterogeneous data correlation, and easy maintenance—while providing a checklist of best practices such as creating applications, customizing data‑source types, verifying time‑field extraction, using lookup tables, combining interactive tokenization with manual editing, leveraging views and materialized views, naming conventions, and alert throttling.

A Q&A section addresses common questions about data‑source‑rule mapping, alert throttling, notification channels, dataset design, and required skills (primarily SQL).