Domain Name Server (DNS) resolution is one of the most important elements for a properly working Internet infrastructure. Without proper DNS resolution, multiple elements of a company’s online services, such as: email, web, streaming, etc… will fail to serve to end users.
Enhancements to our DNS Server Monitoring Platform
The Dotcom-Monitor DNS Monitoring platform has been updated to further ensure that your DNS services are working, resolving properly, and responding quickly.
Below are common uses for the new aspects of our DNS Server Monitoring:
Ensure a host name resolves to a proper IP from the Internet cloud
You can specify a host name and the IP address it should resolve to. Your check will query the root DNS servers and will perform a recursive lookup until the name resolves to an IP address or a CNAME (depending on what you specified). Then, the check will match the returned result with an expected result. If there are any errors during the resolution, or the result is not as expected, an alert can be generated. DNS Monitor supports most record types, such as: A, AAAA, NS, CNAME, SOA, TXT, MX, PTR and SPF.
For example, to ensure www.dotcom-monitor.com resolves to 207.250.234.62 from the Internet, the DNS Monitor set-up is:
The check will perform a recursive lookup like this:
This verifies that www.dotcom-monitor.com resolves to 207.250.234.62 from around the world by all DNS servers.
Verify specific DNS server functionality and availability
It is important for DNS servers to not only resolve properly, but to resolve quickly. For example, some HTTP requests will occur in milliseconds; however, a slow DNS can turn an HTTP request into seconds, thus degrading end-user’s experience. Dotcom-Monitor can check by query to a specific DNS server to resolve the name, verify that returned results are as expected, and the resolution is done within a specific time threshold.
For example, to check that the specific DNS server “ns1.dana-net.com” (responsible for dotcom-monitor.com) returns results in less than one-second, the monitoring set-up is:
Note the “Maximum Connection Timeout (in Seconds) is set for one-second. This will query ns1.dana-net.com directly and will verify that it resolves www.dotcom-monitor.com to 207.250.234.62 in less than one second.
