Hi, I'm the author of this.
About a year ago I open sourced a tool for quick monitoring and troubleshooting Nginx, ngxtop [1], and received some very positive interests from HN community. However quite a few people are using it as a monitoring solution for their Nginx server, which is not ideal. Ngxtop was designed to be like the `top` command, you fire it up to check for at most 5-10 minutes and stop. It was not meant to be a long monitoring process that can be used to plug to your monitoring system such as Zabbix or Nagios or graphed by Graphite. Nginx has an official status module for this [2], but it requires Nginx Plus, a > $1k product. Other solutions would normally require a log processing process piping to an external system to calculate and store the metrics. While an ELK stack [3] could provide you a lot more useful data, its setup and maintenance efforts can be significant. And that's why I created Luameter.
It easier to setup, flexible to configure, and equally easy to be plugged into external system given its JSON api.
[1]: https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop
[2]: http://nginx.com/products/live-activity-monitoring/
[3]: http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/
