Amplifi HD and Pi-Hole – Displaying device names instead of IP Addresses

I recently setup Pi-Hole on my Home Server to block ads at the DNS level and across devices instead of trying to set it up for each device individually. In my setup the Pi-Hole server acts as the DNS server for my network but I kept my AmplifiHD router as the DHCP server. Overall, the setup is straightforward and easy (remember to check the Bypass DNS Cache option in Amplifi UI) and works extremely well. As part of this change, I also enabled DNSSEC and used Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 as my primary DNS instead of my ISP’s DNS provider.

One Issue I found with the setup was that Pi-Hole console would only show IP addresses for the devices on my network when it showed statistics. I thought it would be great to see the actual device names so I can get a clear sense of what each device is doing. After a bit of digging, I found the magic incantation that would make this work with Amplifi HD is to go to Pi-Hole Admin Console, Click on Settings > DNS, Check the “Conditional Forwarding” checkbox, enter your router’s IP address and enter local for the domain name. After doing this change I was immediately able to see device names in the Pi-Hole console instead of IP addresses.