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GitLab has support for automatically detecting and monitoring NGINX. This is provided by leveraging the [NGINX VTS exporter](https://github.com/hnlq715/nginx-vts-exporter), which translates [VTS statistics](https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts) into a Prometheus readable form.
[`environment_filter`](../../../../operations/metrics/dashboards/variables.md#environment_filter) is one of the predefined variables that metrics dashboards support.
To get started with NGINX monitoring, you should first enable the [VTS statistics](https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts) module for your NGINX server. This captures and displays statistics in an HTML readable form. Next, you should install and configure the [NGINX VTS exporter](https://github.com/hnlq715/nginx-vts-exporter) which parses these statistics and translates them into a Prometheus monitoring endpoint.
If you are using NGINX as your Kubernetes Ingress, GitLab [automatically detects](nginx_ingress.md) the metrics once enabled in 0.9.0 and later releases.
however, GitLab needs a method to detect which labels are associated. To do this, GitLab [looks for an `environment` label](index.md#identifying-environments).