CoreDNS integration for Grafana Cloud
CoreDNS is a fast and efficient DNS server written in Go, that chains plugins, where each plugin performs a (DNS) function.
This integration includes 9 useful alerts and 1 pre-built dashboard to help monitor and visualize CoreDNS metrics.
Before you begin
This integration supports CoreDNS version 1.7.0 or greater.
To make metrics available on CoreDNS, both the Prometheus plugin and cache plugin must be enabled.
Install CoreDNS integration for Grafana Cloud
- In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
- Find CoreDNS and click its tile to open the integration.
- Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send CoreDNS metrics to your Grafana Cloud instance.
- Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboard and alerts to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your CoreDNS setup.
Post-install configuration for the CoreDNS integration
After enabling the prometheus plugins, configure Grafana Agent to scrape your CoreDNS nodes.
CoreDNS exposes a /metrics endpoint. To scrape it, add the provided snippets to your agent configuration file.
Make sure to change targets in the snippet according to your environment.
Configuration snippets for Grafana Agent
Below metrics.configs.scrape_configs, insert the following lines and change the URLs according to your environment:
- job_name: integrations/coredns
relabel_configs:
- replacement: '<your-instance-name>'
target_label: instance
static_configs:
- targets: ['localhost:9153']
labels:
cluster: cloudFull example configuration for Grafana Agent
Refer to the following Grafana Agent configuration for a complete example that contains all the snippets used for the CoreDNS integration. This example also includes metrics that are sent to monitor your Grafana Agent instance.
integrations:
prometheus_remote_write:
- basic_auth:
password: <your_prom_pass>
username: <your_prom_user>
url: <your_prom_url>
agent:
enabled: true
relabel_configs:
- action: replace
source_labels:
- agent_hostname
target_label: instance
- action: replace
target_label: job
replacement: "integrations/agent-check"
metric_relabel_configs:
- action: keep
regex: (prometheus_target_.*|prometheus_sd_discovered_targets|agent_build.*|agent_wal_samples_appended_total|process_start_time_seconds)
source_labels:
- __name__
# Add here any snippet that belongs to the `integrations` section.
# For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
logs:
configs:
- clients:
- basic_auth:
password: <your_loki_pass>
username: <your_loki_user>
url: <your_loki_url>
name: integrations
positions:
filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
scrape_configs:
# Add here any snippet that belongs to the `logs.configs.scrape_configs` section.
# For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
metrics:
configs:
- name: integrations
remote_write:
- basic_auth:
password: <your_prom_pass>
username: <your_prom_user>
url: <your_prom_url>
scrape_configs:
# Add here any snippet that belongs to the `metrics.configs.scrape_configs` section.
# For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
- job_name: integrations/coredns
relabel_configs:
- replacement: '<your-instance-name>'
target_label: instance
static_configs:
- targets: ['localhost:9153']
labels:
cluster: cloud
global:
scrape_interval: 60s
wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-walDashboards
The CoreDNS integration installs the following dashboards in your Grafana Cloud instance to help monitor your system.
- CoreDNS
CoreDNS dashboard
Alerts
The CoreDNS integration includes the following useful alerts:
coredns
| Alert | Description |
|---|---|
| CoreDNSDown | Critical: CoreDNS has disappeared from Prometheus target discovery. |
| CoreDNSLatencyHigh | Critical: CoreDNS is experiencing high 99th percentile latency. |
| CoreDNSErrorsHigh | Critical: CoreDNS is returning SERVFAIL. |
| CoreDNSErrorsHigh | Warning: CoreDNS is returning SERVFAIL. |
coredns_forward
| Alert | Description |
|---|---|
| CoreDNSForwardLatencyHigh | Critical: CoreDNS is experiencing high latency forwarding requests. |
| CoreDNSForwardErrorsHigh | Critical: CoreDNS is returning SERVFAIL for forward requests. |
| CoreDNSForwardErrorsHigh | Warning: CoreDNS is returning SERVFAIL for forward requests. |
| CoreDNSForwardHealthcheckFailureCount | Warning: CoreDNS health checks have failed to upstream server. |
| CoreDNSForwardHealthcheckBrokenCount | Warning: CoreDNS health checks have failed for all upstream servers. |
Metrics
The most important metrics provided by the CoreDNS integration, which are used on the pre-built dashboard and Prometheus alerts, are as follows:
- coredns_build_info
- coredns_cache_entries
- coredns_cache_hits_total
- coredns_cache_misses_total
- coredns_dns_request_duration_seconds_bucket
- coredns_dns_request_size_bytes_bucket
- coredns_dns_requests_total
- coredns_dns_response_size_bytes_bucket
- coredns_dns_responses_total
- coredns_forward_healthcheck_broken_total
- coredns_forward_healthcheck_failures_total
- coredns_forward_request_duration_seconds_bucket
- coredns_forward_requests_total
- coredns_forward_responses_total
- coredns_panics_total
- coredns_plugin_enabled
- go_goroutines
- process_cpu_seconds_total
- process_resident_memory_bytes
Changelog
# 0.0.7 - September 2023
* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.
# 0.0.6 - August 2023
- Fix coredns alerts variable not found error
# 0.0.5 - July 2023
- Added Grafana Agent Operator configuration snippet to support CoreDNS in a kubernetes cluster
- Added cluster selector to dashboard for kubernetes support
- Added default cluster label to agent config
# 0.0.4 - April 2023
- Update alerts to include external labels
# 0.0.3 - January 2023
- Update to latest integration structure
- Update to latest upstream mixin
# 0.0.2 - October 2021
- Update mixin to latest version
# 0.0.1 - May 2021
- Initial releaseCost
By connecting your CoreDNS instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.
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