Chapter 27. PowerDNS Metrics, and how to display them

[Warning]Warning

Available in releases after PowerDNS Authoritative Server 3.3.1 and PowerDNS Recursor 3.5.3.

Both PowerDNS daemons generate ample metrics which can be used to monitor performance. These metrics can be polled using the rec_control and pdns_control commands, and they are also available via the http-based API. Finally, they can be pushed to a Carbon/Graphite server, either native carbon, or our own Metronome implementation.

For carbon/graphite/metronome, we use the following namespace. Everything starts with 'pdns.', which is then followed by the local hostname. Thirdly, we add either 'auth' or 'recursor' to siginify the daemon generating the metrics. This is then rounded off with the actual name of the metric. As an example: 'pdns.ns1.recursor.questions'.

Care has been taken to make the sending of statistics as unobtrusive as possible, the daemons will not be hindered by an unreachable carbon server, timeouts or connection refused situations.

To benefit from our carbon/graphite support, either install Graphite, or use our own lightweight statistics daemon, Metronome, currently available on GitHub.

Secondly, set carbon-server, possibly carbon-interval, possibly carbon-ourname in the configuration.