Documentation forIP Address Manager
Managing IP addresses is a key capability of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly Hybrid Cloud Observability) and is available in the Essentials edition. IP Address Manager (IPAM) is also available in a standalone module.

DNS secondary zones and zone transfers

DNS zones should be available on more than one DNS server to ensure availability. If a zone is only available on one server, name queries for that zone will fail if the server goes down or is otherwise unreachable. To ensure the information in the secondary zone remains synchronized with the primary zone, you can specify the frequency of polls and use incremental zone transfers.

Set up a secondary DNS zone

  1. From the DHCP & DNS Management screen, select DNS Zones and click Add.

    The Add DNS Zone window is displayed.

  2. Select the server that the secondary DNS Zone (see warning below) should be applied to, and click Next.

  3. The DNS Zone & Lookup tab is displayed.

  4. Click Add Master DNS Server and enter the URL for the primary DNS zone.
  5. Select the lookup type for the secondary zone, enter a name for it, and click Next.

    The File Name & Transfer tab is displayed.

  6. Check the Enable Zone Transfer box, and either select to use the default zone transfer interval (inherited from the primary DNS Server settings) or enter a specific value here.
  7. Click Manage custom properties to add any custom properties. Click Next.
  8. Verify the details displayed, and then click Add zone.

    The secondary zone is created.

Warning: IPAM uses the DNS Zone Transfer mechanism to get information about DNS records. To achieve this on Windows servers, IPAM poller must be added to the list of servers allowed for zone transfer. This results in IPAM automatically switching the Windows Server setting to "Only to following servers" upon every scan. This means only secondary DNS Zones that are on the servers in the "following servers" list are updated.

Therefore you must ensure that the servers on which you want to create Secondary Zones are included in the list.