Getting started with DNS Insights

A data sink refers to a single integration between the DNS Insights agents and your TSDB. You can have multiple data sinks, each corresponding to a single TSDB. During intial setup, you will create a data sink containing the credentials for your Prometheus (or Prometheus-compatible)database. This information is passed securely to NS1 who will complete the data sink configuration.

A policy is a set of rules determining which data is collected and processed by the DNS Insights agents. By default, all DNS Insights customers have access to the following predefined policies:

Additionally, each customer can request additional custom policies to be configured by the NS1 team as specified in your contract. For example, you can request a policy to collect data related to the following:

When viewing data in the Grafana dashboard, you will select a policy that filters the data shown based on the defined parameters and configuration settings.

Each DNS Insights agent collects various data from the NS1 DNS servers, including DNS metrics (layer 5+) and network-related metrics (layers 3 and 4). The agents send the data to the TSDB every 60 seconds before clearing and starting again. You can view this minute-by-minute breakdown in the line charts, but note that other data shown (such as lists, counts, and pie charts) display data according to the overall time range selected at the top (right) of the page. Refer to this article for a list of metrics collected by the DNS Insights agents.

Each DNS Insights agent in your network sends a time series data stream to your TSDB. For Dedicated DNS networks, the combined rate at which data is sent by all agents is estimated to be between 1,000 to 1,250 metric series per minute.* For Managed DNS networks, this rate is 10,000 to 13,000 metric series per minute. If you are using Grafana Cloud, note that the Grafana Cloud platform uses “active series” to calculate metrics for billing purposes. To estimate the active series billing metric, add the total number of metric series per minute for all policies and multiply by three. For example, if you have one Dedicated DNS policy (at a rate of 1,250 metric series per minute) and one Managed DNS policy (at a rate of 13,000 metric series per minute), then the active series metric used by Grafana Cloud for billing purposes is estimated to be 42,750 — that is, (1,250 + 13,000) x 3 = 42,750. Refer to Grafana documentation for details regarding their billing calculation process.

*The estimated data rate for Dedicated DNS networks (1,250 metric series per minute) is based on a five-PoP deployment (as in, five agents). If your Dedicated network contains more than five PoPs, add 250 to the total rate for each additional agent. In other words, if your Dedicated network contains six PoPs, for example, you would use an estimated rate of 1,500 in your calculations.

Before you begin, consider the following:

Follow the instructions below to configure the DNS Insights integration to begin pushing data to your TSDB and then importing the dashboard(s) to view the collected data in Grafana.

curl -X PUT -H "X-NSONE-Key: $NSONE_API_KEY" -d '
{
    "name": "string",
    "backend": "prometheus",
    "description": "string",
    "config": {
        "remote_host": "example.com",
        "username": "string",
        "password": "string"
    }
}' https://api.nsone.net/v1/insights/sinks