Monitoring unbound?

[Petr Menšík]

No. I think that was question on some conference, DNS-OARC perhaps.

The proposal was what if bind9, unbound, knot-resolver and pdns-recursor 
could create the same format for their statistics. So prometheus could 
have only one statistics parser code. It might be exported to different 
path in filesystem and that should be enough. Only path and content 
should be different for different services. Format should ideally stay 
compatible. Then it would require less code as glue between statistics 
dashboards used and the DNS service itself.

I think such common format would be great. I would prefer something json 
based. I can describe only bind9 and unbound statistics. Their format is 
very different, although quite a lot numbers could be similar.

This is main statistics refactoring issue at bind9

https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/-/issues/38

I am not sure where exactly did they talk about requirements for a new 
format, sorry. I think it was mentioned after some talk at some OARC 
recording, but do not remember which one.

On 21/11/2025 16:02, Paul Wouters wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Nov 2025, Petr Menšík via Unbound-users wrote:
>
>> Such topic were recently started also on BIND9. If you can document 
>> what different statistics is in use now, it might be used to create 
>> one common format used by any DNS service. It is silly when each have 
>> different format, which can be transformed by some external module 
>> into format common on some monitoring service.
>>
>> I am not sure unbound should offer it on HTTP service socket
>
> Do you mean one of these:
>
> unbound-control stats_noreset
> unbound-control stats
>
> Paul

Yes. It would be nice, if it could serve only subtree. Hmm, would be 
cool, if it could serve CH answer.num.stats. TXT? query? Although that 
would need some ACL protection.

The then you want to put this into some graph usually. That needs to 
pick specific fields from these and map them to some graph lines. Every 
implemetation seems to have very different statistics output format.

Systemd people like Varlink format. That could be usable too.

Petr

-- 
Petr Menšík
Senior Software Engineer, RHEL
Red Hat, https://www.redhat.com/
PGP: DFCF908DB7C87E8E529925BC4931CA5B6C9FC5CB