Were you able to shut off the clients? Did it clear the behavior?
I noticed that my Plex setup apparently does a bunch of queries around 0500 local time every day. I'm thinking that whatever you come up with will straighten out the behavior that I'm using as well.
Yes, I changed the DNS locations on my 3 local Plex clients to OpenDNS, instead of my Pi-Hole, so none of my clients currently use Pi-Hole for their DNS queries... I still get a lot of plex.direct related DNS queries in my Query Log, but quite a few less than before (I was averaging 300-500 queries every 10 minutes before, now I'm down to around 100)...
To speak to your Pi-Hole behavior, is there a chance you have Scheduled Tasks running on your Plex server at that time? If your server is updating libraries and upgrading metadata (which are done during scheduled tasks), I would expect to see a noticeable uptick during that time...
I have my Scheduled Tasks set to run in the early AM, and I also see an uptick (but at least I'm expecting that behavior. I can't for the life of my figure out this incessant plex.direct query).
I asked a similar question on reddit yesterday, and got an answer that worked. The fix filters by mac address, and allows it to bypass the pihole.
Thanks for the link- I, as the OP, am not looking to block something; I'm merely looking to have a specific query not be tracked in the query log or stats. I think blocking plex.direct would render my Plex service unusable from outside my network.
I've already successfully set my devices in question to use an external DNS, so my question remains- I would like to be able to have a specific domain not be logged (and therefore not affect stats) either on the way into or out-of my network. In my case, it's a transaction between the Plex.tv service and my internal Plex server (since I've already set my internal server to use an external, non-pi-hole, DNS, I have to assume it's the inbound traffic that messing up my stats)...
Thanks though!
Also, not sure if it helps, but I've been putting together some whitelists. Here's my whitelist GitHub page. One of them is just for Plex! It doesn't solve your problem of things not appearing in the query, but it keeps Plex from getting blocked.
Thanks! Great resource you're putting together there. Too bad we can't whitelist wildcard domains.. yet!