What is Dnsmasq?
Dnsmasq is an open-source, lightweight, DNS caching and forwarding server. It is designed to provide DNS resolution for small and home networks. Dnsmasq provides local DNS caching, forwarding, and recursive lookups, as well as DHCP, TFTP, and other related services. It also has support for DNS and DHCPv6, as well as various other features such as DNS-over-TLS and IPv6 privacy extensions. Dnsmasq is a versatile and highly configurable tool that is simple to use.
You can find more details on DHCP monitoring with Dnsmasq.
Monitoring Dnsmasq with Netdata
The prerequisites for monitoring Dnsmasq with Netdata are to have Dnsmasq and Netdata installed on your system.
Netdata auto discovers hundreds of services, and for those services it doesn’t discover, you can turn on manual discovery with a one line configuration. For more information on configuring Netdata for Dnsmasq monitoring please read the collector documentation.
You should now see the dnsmasq section on the Overview tab in Netdata Cloud already populated with charts about all the metrics you care about.
Netdata has a public demo space (no login required) where you can explore different monitoring use-cases and get a feel for Netdata.
What Dnsmasq metrics are important to monitor?
servers_queries
- The number of queries forwarded to the upstream server.
- failed - Number of failed queries.
- success - Number of successful queries.
cache_size
- The DNS Cache size refers to the number of cached entries and can be configured for optimised performance.
- size - Number of cached entries.
cache_operations
- The cache operations rate.
- evictions - Rate of cached entry evictions.
- Insertions - Rate of cached entry insertions.
cache_performance
- The rate of cache hits.
- hits - Rate of cache hits
- misses - Rate of cache misses
