Maybe not as lightweight, but GoAccess (https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess) does an awesome job at parsing the logs and displaying statistics, works for nginx and other webservers too
This is the tool I've wanted (and half written 3-4 times) my whole career. From reading the github it looks lightweight, not a big infrastructure addition, and that it helps you figure out wtf is going on with the web server.
Regarding the branding, for me top is a real-time tool rather than a logging tool. I was picturing something that may have been more useful for older style Apache httpd installs where you have several virtual hosts on a server and you'd want to know who is hogging the resources or causing the problems.
My last company had something like that and included response time percentiles (50th, 90th, 95th, 99th) and we had these values graphed and displayed on a big screen in our office. Along with a ton of other performance stats: queries per second, various measures of system load, etc.
Averages can lie, especially when something like an empty query can take close to zero time compared to a non-trivial transaction. If some robot or other artifact of your site is generating a some amount of null queries that will make your average response time look better than it actually is. Percentiles, particularly on the tail of 90th or above, tell a better story of how well and consistently you're responding to traffic under load.
I wouldn't mind a screenshot before installing it.
Hmmm... looks like nothing more than a weblog analyzer. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. It's not "real time" since it can only report on what the web-server has done not what it is doing. AFAIK, nginx has nothing like Apache httpd's mod_status... at least, nothing open source.
> This tool is a rewrite of ngxtop to make it more easily installed and hopefully quicker.
Why make a whole new tool with limitations instead of improving the existing one?
Interesting, but I would have thought "top" for nginx would be a tool that shows you all the connections, paths, and resource usage live, like the "top" command. Is there a tool that does that?
How does this compare to goaccess? Similar tool that I've used briefly. One issue I had was how complicated it was, I'm assuming since this is nginx specific it's simpler.
I made something similar in Python [0], but for parsing the error_log directive. Just for the odd time you need to parse that.
>a rewrite of ngxtop to make it more easily installed and hopefully quicker.
What world does this guy live in that a program in Rust is easier to get running on any random machine than python script?
Monitoring capabilities are missing from Nginx on purpose. They are not and will never be available for free because there is "NGINX Plus".
This is why I recommend switching to HAProxy.