title: PowerDNS Recursor: Latency
agents: linux
catalog: app/powerdns
license: GPLv2
author: Christian Wirtz
distribution: powerdns-mkp
description:
 Reports the recursor's question-answer latency and the portion of it spent
 inside the recursor itself. PowerDNS reports both in microseconds; the check
 converts them to seconds. Defaults are {WARN} at 100 ms and {CRIT} at 500 ms
 for the overall latency.

 In addition the check graphs the answer time distribution using the recursor's
 own histogram buckets (under 1 ms, 1-10 ms, 10-100 ms, 100-1000 ms and slower
 than one second) and evaluates the share of answers slower than 100 ms, with
 levels at 10 and 25 percent. The distribution is more informative than the
 average, because a cache-heavy workload keeps the average low even while a
 growing tail of slow answers annoys users.

discovery:
 One service is created when the {qa-latency} counter is present.
