[dns-operations] Monitoring DNS Servers

[david klein]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Stephen Johnson
<stephen.johnson at arkansas.gov> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-06-06 at 23:49 -0500, david klein wrote:
>> . The appliances provide a robust monitoring
>> capability, using SNMP. Does anyone here provide DNS services using
>> the DNS service in Windows 2008, and if so, how do you monitor it? For
>> many of the same political reasons, monitoring with MOM/SCOM would not
>> be an option.
>
> SNMP would only tell you about the appliance's health. It won't tell you
> how the DNS service is faring. And the same would be said of using
> MOM/SCOM, or the like, to monitor the Windows servers. Use a specific
> DNS network check to monitor the DNS services on each appliance and
> server.


Hence the reason for wanting to use it, to instrument the health of
the DNS service; information regarding query volume, memory
utilization and other metrics would allow us to detect degradation
before resolution starts failing, or at least before it starts failing
regularly enough to be detectable.


>
> Any decent network monitoring tool should have a DNS network check. In
> our data center, we use Nagios to monitor both our DNS servers health
> and the DNS network service.


Monitoring the health of the service is intended to augment existing
DNS checks, which are based on queries and measurements of time and
expected results. This is similar to actively instrumenting a router
to detect when its queues are filling up, its memory is dangerously
full or its discards counter is rising, rather than just pinging
across it to a far-side host and waiting for end-to-end traffic to
start failing.



-- 

david t. klein

Cisco Certified Network Associate (CSCO11281885)
Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPI000165615)
Redhat Certified Engineer (805009745938860)

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