Netdata is spamming my nginx - how to cut back

Hi I am new to netdata and not a netdata programmer

I have inherited a netdata configuration.

I can see in my nginx/access.log that netdata makes up 99% of the requests. And I am getting an alert that I have too many requests on nginx. Which seems like a circular problem.

I set the update_every to 30
It still hits the log every 1.

Also is there any way to configure netdata to tell me what it is actually complaining about?

This is just meaningless to me:

$this > (($status >= $WARNING) ? ($update_every) : ( 5 * $update_every))
EVALUATED EXPRESSION
[ $this = 6 ] [ $status = 1 ] [ $WARNING = 3 ] [ ${update_every} = 1 ]

Is it saying I got 6 requests and it sent me a warning?

How would I configure it to warn me on something relevant like 1000 requests?