DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

Understanding Name Server Statistics

You should periodically look over the statistics on some of your name servers. Name server statistics are viewed with the System Monitor. To start it, select Start → Administrative Tools → Performance. Make sure System Monitor is selected in the left pane, right-click in the right pane, and select Add Counters. Select DNS in the Performance object pull-down list. You’ll see a list of all the server parameters that you can monitor in real time. A brief explanation of each parameter is available in the Windows online help system document entitled “Monitoring DNS server performance.” To view this document, choose Start → Help and type Monitoring DNS Server Performance in the search box and press Enter. Click the help topic button in the left pane and click on the document link when it appears.

Selecting all parameters is not useful—it produces too much information. To get an idea of the amount of memory being used by the server, choose Caching Memory and Database Node Memory. To see how busy the server is—that is, how many queries it is handling—look at Total Query Received/sec and Total Response Sent/sec. To select several parameters, hold down the Ctrl key while single-clicking. When you’ve selected all the ones you want, choose Add, then Close. Note that you have to save this list if you want to avoid selecting the list of parameters again. Select File → Save As to produce a .msc file that you can use for subsequent monitoring sessions.