Curious where your DNS traffic is coming from, how much DNS traffic is on your domain, and what records people are querying for that don’t exist? We now have a Grafana plugin for you.

Grafana is an open source data visualization tool that you can use to integrate data from many sources into one cohesive dashboard, and even use it to set up alerts. We’re big Grafana fans here - we use Grafana internally for our ops metrics dashboards.

In the Cloudflare Grafana plugin, you can see the response code breakdown of your DNS traffic. During a random prefix flood, a common type of DNS DDoS attack where an attacker queries random subdomains to bypass DNS caches and overwhelm the origin nameservers, you will see the number of NXDOMAIN responses increase dramatically. It is also common during normal traffic to have a small amount of negative answers due to typos or clients searching for missing records.

You can also see the breakdown of queries by data center and by query type to understand where your traffic is coming from and what your domains are being queried for. This is very useful to identify localized issues, and to see how your traffic is spread globally.

You can filter by specific data centers, record types, query types, response codes, and query name, so you can filter down to see analytics for just the MX records that are returning errors in one of the data centers, or understand whether the negative answers are generated because of a DNS attack, or misconfigured records.

Once you have the Cloudflare Grafana Plugin installed, you can also make your own charts using the Cloudflare data set in Grafana, and integrate them into your existing dashboards.

Virtual DNS customers can also take advantage of the Grafana plugin. There is a custom Grafana dashboard that comes installed with the plugin to show traffic distribution and RTT from different Virtual DNS origins, as well as the top queries that uncached or are returning SERVFAIL.

The Grafana plugin is just one step to install once you have Grafana up and running:

grafana-cli plugins install cloudflare-app

Once you sign in using your user email and API key, the plugin will automatically discover domains and Virtual DNS clusters you have access to.

The Grafana plugin is built on our new DNS analytics API. If you want to explore your DNS traffic but Grafana isn’t your tool of choice, our DNS analytics API is very easy to get started with. Here’s a curl to get you started:

curl -s -H 'X-Auth-Key:####' -H 'X-Auth-Email:####' 'https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/####/dns_analytics/report?metrics=queryCount’

To make all of this work, Cloudflare DNS is answering and logging millions of queries each second. Having high resolution data at this scale enables us to quickly pinpoint and resolve problems, and we’re excited to share this with you. More on this in a follow up deep dive blog post on improvements in our new data pipeline.

Instructions for how to get started with Grafana are here and DNS analytics API documentation is here. Enjoy!

This blog post was edited on 9/20/18 to update installation instructions.