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Sara Dickinson edited this page Mar 3, 2021 · 2 revisions

About DNS-STATS Visualizer

Background

The project was initially developed for ICANN by Sinodun IT.

DNS-STATS Compactor uses Semantic versioning for releases.

How to contribute to DNS STATS.

DNS-STATS Visualizer framework

The DNS-STATS Visualizer is a framework for a system which can:

  • Consume DNS traffic data files recorded in Compacted-DNS (C-DNS, RFC8618) format from nameservers. (Files in C-DNS format can be generated by DNS-STATS compactor.)

  • Populate a ClickHouse database with per query/response level data (and additionally aggregate data at a chosen time interval)

  • Produce DSC-like statistics graphs of the recorded traffic in Grafana (see Screenshots).

As a result, users can either perform ad-hoc queries directly against the ClickHouse database or customize Grafana to create graphs specific to their needs.

Visualizer is designed as a multi-host system. Hosts in a Visualizer system fill one of the following basic roles:

  • Datastore server. The hosts to which nameservers send their C-DNS files are known as datastores. They are responsible for importing the C-DNS data into the main ClickHouse table (via an intermediate tab-separated values (TSV) file). C-DNS files are archived after import.

    • C-DNS can also, optionally, be converted to PCAP files.

  • ClickHouse server. A host or a cluster of hosts running a ClickHouse server.

  • Grafana server. A host running a Grafana instance providing Visualizer displays (dashboards).

Depending on the volume of traffic received, processing can also be split between multiple datastores and across a ClickHouse cluster. Our example install is for 3 separate hosts, with pointers to additional configuration options, see Documentation and Installation.

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