Help understanding Bind 9 Statistics

[Rich Parkin]

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