Traffic Director is a powerful product. Like all powerful products, Traffic Director can seem overwhelming in its depth of features. Use this information to develop an understanding of Traffic Director and to aid you in properly configuring it for your needs.

The job of Traffic Director is to answer DNS Queries with the appropriate DNS Records for the location where the query originated. For Example: If your website receives a query from a user in New Hampshire, Traffic Director can answer that query with a record you chose based on the origin of the query and the availability of the DNS records.

WARNING: Making changes to any one Traffic Director object with multiple sessions, either via the API or GUI, may cause unexpected behavior. This unexpected behavior could result in unintentional service changes or the inability to propagate new zone changes.

Traffic Director Structure

Traffic Director has several components that work together in this hierarchy:

RuleSets (See Managing Rule Sets) contain one or more Response Pools (See Managing Response Pools). Rulesets identify the Response Pools to be served based on the geographic origin of each query. Response Pools usually correspond to your network’s points of presence, the locations where you serve DNS records. Group your resources from each network location into a single Response Pool, then setup Response Pool failover to have one location failover to the next logical location.

NOTE: Total number of records in a single Response Pool may not be more than 255.

Response Pools contain one Record Set Failover Chain (See Configure Record Set Failover Chains) for each record type. This ensures that if the first record, or group of records, chosen to answer the query is not available (offline), another record is already identified as its backup (failover).

Record Set Failover Chains contain DNS Records (See Managing Records) grouped by record type into Record Sets (See Managing Rule Sets). Record Sets are designed to serve Records that are available (online). They usually contain more than one Record so that if a specific Record is unavailable, another can be served in its place.

Monitors and Notifiers

Monitors for Traffic Director identify objects on your network to be watched for potential failure. (See Configuring Monitors) If a failure occurs, the monitor a) notifies the designated email address with either a summary or detailed account of the failure, and/or b) updates the Traffic Director to mark associated records as ineligible for DNS responses.

Notifiers alert designated email addresses to a state change in either the Traffic Director Service (Service Notifiers) or a monitored network object (Monitor Notifiers). (See Understanding Notifications)