Operations FAQ

I have a broken zone

A zone is considered broken when it is not receiving updates anymore. Its status can be “ERROR” if Designate detected the error condition or it can be stuck in “PENDING” for a long time.

Review the logs from the API, Central, Zone Manager, Pool Manager and MiniDNS. Identify the transaction ID of the last successful change and the first failing change. Using the ID, you can filter logs from the Designate components that are related to the same transaction. Look for log messages with ERROR level before and after the first failing update.

Failures in updating a zone are usually related to problems in Zone Manager, Pool Manager, MiniDNS or the database.

Ensure the services are running and network connectivity is not impaired.

Transient network issues can be the cause of a broken zone. Zone Manager and Pool Manager are stateful services and perform attempts at restoring failing zones over time. Restarting the services will trigger new attempts.

I have a broken pool

I deleted a zone but it’s still in the database

Deleted zones are flagged with “status” set to “DELETED” and “task” set to “NONE” once the deletion process terminates successfully.

What ports should be open?

Port numbers are configurable: review your designate.conf

The default values are:

Component (header rows optional) Protocol Port numbers
Agent TCP 5358
UDP 5358
API TCP 9001
Keystone (external) TCP 35357
MiniDNS TCP 5354
UDP 5354
MySQL TCP 3306
RabbitMQ TCP 5672
Resolvers TCP 53
UDP 53
ZooKeeper TCP 2181
TCP 2888,3888

What network protocol are used?

HTTP[S] by the API, RabbitMQ and the MySQL protocol by most components, DNS (resolution and XFR), ZooKeeper, Memcached.

What needs access to the Database?

Central, MiniDNS

What needs access to RabbitMQ?

The API, Central, Zone Manager, Pool Manager, MiniDNS

What needs access to ZooKeeper?

Pool and Zone Manager

What needs access to Memcached?

API and Pool Manager

How do I monitor Designate?

Designate can be monitored by various monitoring systems listed here

OpenStack recommends Monasca

What are useful metrics to monitor?

  • General host monitoring, i.e. CPU load, memory usage, disk and network I/O
  • MySQL performance, errors and free disk space
  • Number of zones in ACTIVE, PENDING and ERROR status
  • API queries per second, broken down by “read” and “write” operation on zones, records, etc
  • Zone change propagation time i.e. how long does it takes for a record update to reach the resolvers
  • Log messages containing having “ERROR” level
  • Quotas utilization i.e. number of existing records/zones against the maximum allowed
  • Memcached, RabbitMQ, ZooKeeper performance and errors

What are useful metrics to review first during an incident?

  • Host, network and MySQL performance metrics
  • Number of zones in ACTIVE, PENDING and ERROR status
  • Log messages containing having “ERROR” level