Question

Discuss the use of network management tools which have a relation with the DNS. (Give at least one tool which is not listed in the textbook and discuss its output)

Answer 1

There are several network management tools which have relation with DNS.Few among them are:

• PRTG Network Monitor from Paessler.
• ManageEngine OpManager.
• WhatsUp Gold 2017
• Nagios XI
• Zabbix.
• Datadog
• ConnectWise Automate.

ZABBIX

Zabbix is an open source monitoring tool. It is popular for its easy-to-use and pleasing Web GUI that is fully configurable. Zabbix focuses on monitoring and trending functionality. This software is frequently used for monitoring servers and network hardware. One of the highlights of Zabbix is that it can predict trends in your traffic. Zabbix can forecast future behavior based on historical data.

Since it is open source, it has an active user community spread around the world and good documentation. Zabbix gives the freedom to use the open-source solution without vendor lock-ins (including all components).

Zabbix is powerful for SMB networks below 1,000 nodes. Over that, the software can get slower and its performance decreased. Another disadvantage is that it doesn’t include real-time tests and reports.

Service monitoring functionality is intended for those who want to get a high-level (business) view of monitored infrastructure. In many cases, we are not interested in low-level details, like the lack of disk space, high processor load, etc. What we are interested in is the availability of service provided by our IT department. We can also be interested in identifying weak places of IT infrastructure, SLA of various IT services, the structure of existing IT infrastructure, and other information of a higher level.

Zabbix service monitoring provides answers to all mentioned questions.

Services is a hierarchy representation of monitored data.

A very simple service structure may look like:

Service | |-Workstations | | | |-Workstation1 | | | |-Workstation2 | |-Servers

Each node of the structure has attribute status. The status is calculated and propagated to upper levels according to the selected algorithm. At the lowest level of services are triggers. The status of individual nodes is affected by the status of their triggers.

To monitor the DNS service itself on the port, you can use the following key in the data items (where SERVER is the IP address or DNS server domain):

1	net.tcp.dns[SERVER]

In order not to create a template from scratch, you can clone eg the standard “Template App SSH Service” by changing the name in it and specifying a new key, the trigger will change automatically. And also in the “Type” we select “Zabbix agent” instead of a simple check.