statistics file

[JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉]

At Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:18:23 -0400,
CB <bdyslm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm hoping someone can help as I am completely confused and the BIND ARM
> doesnt answer my questions. For one it doesnt explain what categories are
> inclusive of others, if any, which I would think some are.
> For example:
> 
> I would think that authoritative answers are included in succesful
> answers...logical but clearly cant be if you look at the numbers below.

authoritative answers include nxdomain and nxrrset.
successful answers include authoritative and non-authoritative
answers.

> I would think "responses sent" would be inclusive of
> success/auth,non-auth,nxrrset, nxdomain, and recursion. Again, the math
> doesnt add up.

responses include messages in response to queries, update requests,
and notifies.

> I would expect things like IPv4 rcvd and EDNS rcvd/snt to be spread out
> across all of the other categories.
> 
> When it comes down to it, I really just want to find out how many
> authoritative requests each of my nameservers are handling per second or
> minute or hour.

Isn't it the 'queries resulted in authoritative answer'?

> ++ Name Server Statistics ++
>             29632304 IPv4 requests received
>             15686952 requests with EDNS(0) received
>             26043352 auth queries rejected
>               235235 recursive queries rejected
>                   97 update requests rejected
>             29394860 responses sent
>             15686952 responses with EDNS(0) sent
>              1886089 queries resulted in successful answer
>              3055142 queries resulted in authoritative answer
>                  913 queries resulted in non authoritative answer
>               763935 queries resulted in nxrrset
>               406031 queries resulted in NXDOMAIN
>                  120 queries caused recursion
>             26100395 other query failures
> 
> Also, it doesnt really explain what qualifies to fall into each category,
> only a reiteration of what the category is. For example what qualifies as
> "other query failures"?

In general, it means miscellaneous errors other than server failure,
format error, NXDOMAIN, duplicate or dropped.  In the above
statistics, most of them seem to be refused (rejected) queries.

> What differentiates a NXRRSET from an NXDOMAIN?

These are well known terminologies, not specific to this statistics
implementation.

> Is there a LEG (Layman Explanation Guide) out there that might assume one
> doesnt know this and go into a little more depth on some of the definitions?

As far as I know the ARM and the source code are the only source of
information.  Maybe we need the 6th edition of "DNS and BIND":-)
Seriously, we understand the documentation for the new statistics
implementation is not really sufficient, and we plan to improve it.  At
the moment, however, we have a lot of other things to prioritize.  If
you have specific ideas on how to improve it, please submit it to
bind9-bugs at isc.org.

Thanks,

---
JINMEI, Tatuya
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.