PowerDNS Recursor monitoring with Netdata

PowerDNS Recursor is a high-performance DNS recursor with built-in scripting capabilities.

This module monitors one or more PowerDNS Recursor instances, depending on your configuration.

It collects metrics from the internal webserver.

Used endpoints:

• /api/v1/servers/localhost/statistics

Requirements

For collecting metrics via HTTP, we need:

• enabled webserver.
• enabled HTTP API.

Charts

• Incoming questions in questions/s
• Outgoing questions in questions/s
• Queries answered within a time range in queries/s
• Timeouts on outgoing UDP queries in timeouts/s
• Drops in drops/s
• Cache Usage in events/s
• Cache Size in entries

Configuration

Edit the go.d/powerdns_recursor.conf configuration file using edit-config from the Netdata config directory, which is typically at /etc/netdata.

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

To add a new endpoint to collect metrics from, or change the URL that Netdata looks for, add or configure the name and url values. Endpoints can be both local or remote as long as they expose their metrics on the provided URL.

Here is an example with two endpoints:

jobs:
  - name: local
    url: http://127.0.0.1:8081

  - name: remote
    url: http://203.0.113.0:8081

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

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot issues with the powerdns_recursor 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 powerdns_recursor