external-dns, DigitalOcean, and Netlify
I wanted DigitalOcean to manage all my domains, including this one, but using the apex domain
requires Netlify to manage your DNS for
you.
This meant one more thing to do manually after a fresh Argo CD
run: point
webmentions.shivjm.blog at my load balancer on the Netlify side. I wish
external-dns would take a leaf out of
external-dns-management’s book and add a handler for Netlify
DNS.
Or maybe I could have added external-dns-management just for shivjm.blog. Or maybe I should have
switched to Cloudflare DNS so everything could be managed there by external-dns… but I can’t
do that, because .in isn’t a supported TLD even
now.
At any rate, for a long time, I was using the Bitnami external-dns Helm chart but specifying values targeting the one in the repository. I switched to the Bitnami syntax and all of a sudden it was correctly creating a ServiceMonitor.
I next wanted a dashboard for it so I added one I found in a GitHub repository linked on Discord, but it had no context. When I opened it in Grafana, I discovered it was primarily concerned with the uptime of external-dns, so I removed it.
I thought I’d try creating one myself. Unfortunately, long story short, the metrics the application itself provides don’t seem particularly useful to me. Maybe once I’ve used it for a while I’ll have a sense of how to interpret them. I switched to more or less the same dashboard from grafana.com for the time being but mostly ignore it.