As Zabbix 7.0 gains some enhancements in DNS monitoring, too, let's add to that my synthetic monitoring toolpack theme of the week. I'm not actually sure if my global testing is global in reality, as this is going through Proton VPN. The results look such similar that maybe the tests are using some nearby Proton VPN DNS server... I didn't yet check with Wireshark. Anyway, let's imagine this would work.
Setup the DNS tests
So, there's two Zabbix agent items you can use: net.dns.perf for performance check, and net.dns.record for checking what's the result coming back from DNS server. I applied these to my blogprobe hosts I created in my two previous blog entries.
The items themselves are very simple:
That's it!
Check that it works
By going to Latest data we can see that this works:
Adding some widgets
To visualize this, I added two widgets - a graph for performance, and a plain text widget for the query results.
And done!
DNS monitoring gone overkill
I mentioned this when I first started using Zabbix 7.0beta1, but if you really want, you can go nuts with DNS monitoring details ... here is a visualization how it can look.
Final words
So, this week, with some few relatively simple steps, I built a simplified global blog availability monitoring for my blog, covering HTTP, traceroute and DNS checks happening over multiple Proton VPN connections. This kind of technique can be used if you don't have the possibility to use remote Zabbix proxies and agents, or if you cannot use services like Grafana Cloud.
Once again, Zabbix to the rescue! In the end, observability is simple. Next time, we'll build some fancy dashboards based on the data we have collected so far.
Comments (2)
Where is this in the app?
GRS (not verified)
Where are any of these screenshots from within the Zabbix console? Some guidance would be helpful.
The post has screenshots
whatsuphome
Are you not seeing the screenshots in the post? In that case when you arrived to read the post there might have been something going on with this blog hosting place. The post has multiple screenshots. :)
Or if you saw the screenshots, what kind of screenshots would you like to see?