Questions to Determine

• How many CoreDNS replicas are running and what are their resource limits?
• What is the current QPS (queries per second) hitting CoreDNS?
• What does the pod's /etc/resolv.conf look like (ndots, search domains)?
• How many search domain suffixes are being tried before the actual lookup?
• Are CoreDNS pods showing CPU throttling or memory pressure?
• Is there a NodeLocal DNSCache deployed?
• Are external domain lookups generating excessive internal search queries due to ndots:5?
• What CoreDNS plugins are enabled and are any causing latency (e.g., log plugin)?