BIND zone statistics tracking?

Question

I am trying to get an accurate estimate of how many queries/{day,week,month} my DNS servers process for a specific subset of zones. I ran "rndc stats" and got a statistics file out of the deal, but it includes queries for ALL zones, and I need statistics for only a subset. I have the thought that this can be accomplished by adding "zone-statistics no" to the zone{ } part of the zone file, but I'm not confident to just try it and see what happens. Is this the correct procedure, or is there another way?

OS: OpenSuSE 11.2 BIND: 9.5

Thanks,

Kendall

Answer 1

zone-statistics is the way.

You either set it yes globally (in "options") and set no for non-interesting zones, or vice-versa - set no globally and yes for zones of interest.

--cut here--

Actually you have 3 ways to obtain statistics:

1. rndc stats
2. HTTP (statistics-channel)
3. Queries log (will log ALL queries for ALL zones)

Obviously if what you need is just statistics, 1 and 2 are the right ways. To control them per-zone you use zone-statistics statement. Logging (3) can't be controlled per zone inside BIND.

Answer 2

This isn't particularly elegant, but here goes.

In your configuration (same place you'd put zone{} blocks, but not inside one), add something like this:

logging {
    channel query_log {
        file "/var/log/named.queries"; // or somewhere else
        print-time yes;
    };
    category queries { query_log; };
 };

You'd be responsible for analyzing the file (grep ... | wc or something) yourself.

You might also want to consider log rotation if you don't want the file to grow forever. Bind has some built-in support for rolling over logs based on file size or named restarts, or you could use something external like logrotate. Bind's logging options are detailed at http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch7/logging.html

Answer 3

Bind support statistics. Cjeck the detail in the Bind 9 Configuration Reference. I think you want to set zone-statistics to yes to do what you want.