Background

Following is a general definition of the technology that lays behind DIGMonitor.

DIGMonitor uses the dig command
- dig (domain information groper) command gathers and returns DNS information in a format the name server can use directly.

Options

There are a handful of important fields:

Record Name
- The domain name or url you want to query
DNS Server
- DNS server you want to use for the lookup
Port
- Port of the DNS server, good if you have non-standard port set
Record Type
- Which record type to have the DNS server lookup. Each type has different properties, though none of this is returned to Zenoss. You may want to see if mail exchange (MX) domains take longer to load than an IP (A)
severity
- the severity of an event, if thrown
cycle time
- how often the domain is checked

check_dns Documentation

Following is the documentation from the nagios version of the same implementation, which Zennos’s is based off of. Very similar functionality and provides some more detailed descriptions.

$ $ZENHOME/libexec/check_dig --help
check_dig (nagios-plugins 1.4.5) 1.45

This plugin test the DNS service on the specified host using dig

Usage:check_dig -H host -l lookup [-p <server port>] [-T <query type>] [-w <warning interval>] [-c <critical interval>] [-t <timeout>] [-a <expected answer address>] [-v]

Options:
 -h, --help
    Print detailed help screen
 -V, --version
    Print version information
 -H, --hostname=ADDRESS
    Host name, IP Address, or unix socket (must be an absolute path)
 -p, --port=INTEGER
    Port number (default: 53)
 -l, --lookup=STRING
    machine name to lookup
 -T, --record_type=STRING
    record type to lookup (default: A)
 -a, --expected_address=STRING
    an address expected to be in the answer section.if not set, uses whatever was in -l
 -w, --warning=DOUBLE
    Response time to result in warning status (seconds)
 -c, --critical=DOUBLE
    Response time to result in critical status (seconds)
 -t, --timeout=INTEGER
    Seconds before connection times out (default: 10)
 -v, --verbose
    Show details for command-line debugging (Nagios may truncate output)