Architecture

There are four logical components in the dnstap system:

• The encoding format, which specifies how to encode event messages (or "dnstap payloads").
• The transport, which carries serialized event messages over a reliable byte-stream socket.
• The sender, which generates events using the encoding format and hands them off to the transport.
• The receiver, which consumes serialized events from the transport, potentially deserializing them using the encoding format.

The following diagram depicts a dnstap-enabled system integrating all four components. Note that the transport in this system is an advanced asynchronous implementation that uses per-thread worker queues.