Chapter 6. Logging & Monitoring Authoritative Server performance

Table of Contents

1. Webserver
2. Via init.d commands
3. Operational logging using syslog

In a production environment, you will want to be able to monitor PDNS performance. For this purpose, currently two methods are available, the webserver and the init.d dump, show and mrtg, commands. Furthermore, PDNS can perform a configurable amount of operational logging. This chapter also explains how to configure syslog for best results.

1. Webserver

To launch the internal webserver, add a webserver statement to the pdns.conf. This will instruct the PDNS daemon to start a webserver on localhost at port 8081, without password protection. Only local users (on the same host) will be able to access the webserver by default. The webserver lists a lot of information about the PDNS process, including frequent queries, frequently failing queries, lists of remote hosts sending queries, hosts sending corrupt queries etc. The webserver does not allow remote management of the daemon. The following nameserver related configuration items are available:

webserver

If set to anything but 'no', a webserver is launched.

webserver-address

Address to bind the webserver to. Defaults to 127.0.0.1, which implies that only the local computer is able to connect to the nameserver! To allow remote hosts to connect, change to 0.0.0.0 or the physical IP address of your nameserver.

webserver-password

If set, viewers will have to enter this plaintext password in order to gain access to the statistics.

webserver-port

Port to bind the webserver to. Defaults to 8081.