DNSdist monitoring with Netdata

DNSdist is a highly DNS-, DoS- and abuse-aware loadbalancer.

This module monitors load-balancer performance and health metrics.

It collects metrics from the internal webserver.

Used endpoints:

• /jsonstat?command=stats.

Requirements

For collecting metrics via HTTP, we need enabled webserver.

Charts

• Client queries received in queries/s
• Client queries dropped in queries/s
• Packets dropped in packets/s
• Answers statistics in answers/s
• Backend responses in responses/s
• Backend communication errors in errors/s
• Backend error responses in responses/s
• Cache performance in answers/s
• DNSdist server CPU utilization in ms/s
• DNSdist server memory utilization in MiB
• Query latency in queries/s
• Average latency for the last N queries in microseconds

Configuration

Edit the go.d/dnsdist.conf configuration file using edit-config from the Agent's config directory, which is typically at /etc/netdata.

cd /etc/netdata # Replace this path with your Netdata config directory
sudo ./edit-config go.d/dnsdist.conf

Needs url and password or apikey to access the webserver.

Here is a configuration example:

jobs:
  - name: local
    url: 'http://127.0.0.1:8083'
    headers:
      X-API-Key: 'your-api-key' # static pre-shared authentication key for access to the REST API (api-key).

  - name: remote
    url: 'http://203.0.113.0:8083'
    headers:
      X-API-Key: 'your-api-key' # static pre-shared authentication key for access to the REST API (api-key).

For all available options, see the dnsdist collector's configuration file.

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot issues with the dnsdist collector, run the go.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

First, navigate to your plugins directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the setting plugins directory. Once you're in the plugin's directory, switch to the netdata user.

cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/
sudo -u netdata -s

You can now run the go.d.plugin to debug the collector:

./go.d.plugin -d -m dnsdist