name: CoreDNS Metrics Capabilities
description: >-
  Workflow capabilities exposed by the CoreDNS prometheus plugin for
  observability, alerting, and capacity planning.
url: https://coredns.io/plugins/metrics/
version: '1.0'
modified: '2026-04-28'
api: CoreDNS Metrics API
baseURL: http://localhost:9153
capabilities:
  - name: Prometheus Scrape
    description: >-
      Expose CoreDNS request, response, latency, and build metrics in
      Prometheus exposition format on /metrics for scraping by Prometheus
      or compatible collectors.
    operations:
      - getMetrics
    inputs:
      - scrape interval
    outputs:
      - Prometheus text exposition format
      - Counters, gauges, histograms
  - name: DNS Latency Analysis
    description: >-
      Use the request duration histogram to compute p50, p95, p99 latency
      percentiles per zone and DNS type.
    operations:
      - getMetrics
    outputs:
      - Latency histograms
  - name: Traffic Volume Tracking
    description: >-
      Track DNS request and response counts over time, partitioned by zone,
      type, protocol, and rcode for capacity planning.
    operations:
      - getMetrics
    outputs:
      - Request and response counters
useCases:
  - name: Prometheus + Grafana Dashboard
    description: Scrape CoreDNS metrics and visualize cluster DNS health in Grafana.
    capabilities:
      - Prometheus Scrape
      - Traffic Volume Tracking
      - DNS Latency Analysis
  - name: SLO Alerting
    description: Alert when DNS latency or error rate exceeds defined service level objectives.
    capabilities:
      - DNS Latency Analysis
      - Prometheus Scrape
  - name: Capacity Forecasting
    description: Use long-term metric trends to forecast required replica counts.
    capabilities:
      - Traffic Volume Tracking