A future-proof architecture, lower operational costs, improved scalability, and more efficient platform management through containerization, automation, orchestration, lifecycle management, monitoring, and alerting – these are just some of the advantages of a cloud-native PowerDNS deployment with Cloud Control. This approach has made PowerDNS a leader in cloud-native DNS.
In recent months, we have invested significant effort into making more and more PowerDNS components available for cloud-native deployments. Now that our entire portfolio is available through Cloud Control for cloud-native deployments, we have turned to the next major challenge: visualizing and managing DNS services across many clusters. This is extremely difficult due to the lack of multi-cluster capabilities in Kubernetes, as well as the absence of application-specific management features, such as checking cache consistency or managing database failover, backup, and restore operations.
Today, we are excited to announce a new add-on for Cloud Control that addresses exactly this problem: PowerDNS Single Pane of Glass.
Single Pane of Glass provides a unified way to observe, manage, and operate cloud-native PowerDNS deployments at scale. Instead of juggling dashboards, clusters, regions, and tools, you get a single web-based interface, which lets you monitor and manage DNS services across multiple clusters. It allows you to easily observe the status of PowerDNS services across up to 1,000 clusters, spanning multiple regions and geographies.
At the core of Single Pane of Glass is a unified dashboard that provides immediate visibility into the status of all DNS clusters. At a glance, you can identify which clusters are healthy, which are degraded, and where operational attention is required – across all environments and regions. This eliminates blind spots and enables faster, more confident decision-making, regardless of the size of your deployment.
In addition, it provides PowerDNS-specific management capabilities. To identify DNS discrepancies across multiple servers, Single Pane of Glass enables fast testing and comparison of DNS queries. It allows users to query many servers simultaneously instead of checking them one by one, while visual comparisons highlight differences instantly. This makes it highly efficient to detect inconsistencies in DNS responses. Pod logs provide additional context for unexpected results, and query outputs can be exported to attach diagnostics to tickets or reports.
Single Pane of Glass also supports mass cache clearing to maintain consistency. This is especially useful when DNS records are updated and changes need to be propagated across multiple clusters. With a single operation, it allows targeting the correct zones and services and provides immediate feedback as tasks complete.
If issues arise within a cluster or pod, Single Pane of Glass simplifies troubleshooting by enabling users to view and filter logs from multiple pods in one place. There is no need to SSH into servers or work with complex kubectl commands. Logs are streamed live rather than provided as static snapshots. The multi-pod view helps correlate events across replicas, making root-cause analysis faster and more effective. Finally, log files can be downloaded and shared, for example, with the support team.
Incorporating full role-based access control capabilities, observability and management functions can be fully controlled and delegated to teams and individuals. A powerful query language leverages a fully flexible labeling system, allowing services to be selected and grouped for observability or management purposes, which is key to managing a service hosted on tens or even hundreds of clusters.
Sounds interesting? It certainly is. Learn more about the key use cases in the Single Pane of Glass booklet, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
