Track the performance of your PowerDNS Recursor and monitor strange or worrisome traffic. This Agent check collects a wealth of metrics from your recursors, including those for:

• Query answer times - see how many responses take less than 1ms, 10ms, 100ms, 1s, and greater than 1s
• Query timeouts
• Cache hits and misses
• Answer rates by type - SRVFAIL, NXDOMAIN, NOERROR
• Ignored and dropped packets

And many more.

The PowerDNS Recursor check is included in the Datadog Agent package, so you don't need to install anything else on your recursors.

This check collects performance statistics via pdns_recursor's statistics API. Versions of pdns_recursor before 4.1 do not enable the stats API by default. If you're running an older version, enable it by adding the following to your recursor config file (e.g. /etc/powerdns/recursor.conf):

webserver=yes
api-key=changeme             # only available since ver 4.0
webserver-readonly=yes       # default no
#webserver-port=8081         # default 8082
#webserver-address=0.0.0.0   # default 127.0.0.1

If you're running pdns_recursor 3.x, prepend experimental- to these option names, e.g. experimental-webserver=yes.

If you're running pdns_recursor >= 4.1, just set api-key.

Restart the recursor to enable the statistics API.

1. Edit the powerdns_recursor.d/conf.yaml file, in the conf.d/ folder at the root of your Agent's configuration directory. See the sample powerdns_recursor.d/conf.yaml for all available configuration options:

       init_config:
   
       instances:
     	- host: 127.0.0.1
           port: 8082
           api_key: changeme
           version: 4 # omit this line if you're running pdns_recursor version 3.x

2. Restart the Agent to begin sending PowerDNS Recursor metrics to Datadog.

Run the Agent's status subcommand and look for powerdns_recursor under the Checks section.

See metadata.csv for a list of metrics provided by this integration.

The PowerDNS Recursor check does not include any events.### Service Checks

powerdns.recursor.can_connect:

Returns CRITICAL if the Agent is unable to connect to the recursor's statistics API, otherwise OK.

Need help? Contact Datadog support.