Help understanding Bind 9 Statistics

Rich Parkin RParkin at ldmi.com
Mon Jun 20 14:34:06 UTC 2005


Trying the list again...

Anyone out there who can shed some light on this?  I've been searching =
for=20
an answer and haven't found one yet.

I'm trying to understand which statistics from named.stats for Bind 9 I =
need=20
to add together to get the total number of queries the server is handling.

My confusion is due to the fact that some of the statistics sound like =
they=20
might overlap.  For example, a successful query might also be a =
recursive=20
one.  Or an nxrrset response might have been the result of recursion.

Read below to see my original message.

>>> "Rich Parkin" <RParkin at ldmi.com> 06/15/05 5:36 PM >>>
After reading and re-reading the relevant sections of DNS & BIND and the
DNS & BIND Cookbook, I still have questions about the statistics generated
by Bind 9.  My reason for asking is because I intend to track and graph
these statistics for each of my servers and need an accurate understanding
of what they are.

I have a little confusion over which stats are used to calculate total
queries.  The Cookbook says to add success, nxrrset, and nxdomain in each
statistics block, find the difference between the two totals, and divide
by the seconds to get the query rate.  But I don't understand why I
wouldn't include failures as well, if I'm trying to get a total.  For that
matter, I don't understand why I wouldn't add them all up given the
description of what each statistic means.  A referral or a failure is
still a query attempt whether or not the server actually handles it,
right?

Is the recursion statistic a subset of the total number of query attempts,
or just the successful ones, or what?  From the description, I would guess
that any success, nxrrset, nxdomain, or failure might be the result of a
recursive query.

DNS & BIND says that failure is the number of queries received that
resulted in errors -not- covered by nxrrset and nxdomain.  The Cookbook
says almost the same thing, but excludes nxrrset and says that a failure
is any error not covered by nxdomain.  Is the description in DNS & BIND
more correct?

And on a related topic, how do I 'zero' out the statistics if I want to do
that?  Are they zeroed out when named is started fresh, or is something
else needed?

Richard Parkin
CCNA
Network Engineering
LDMI Telecommunications





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