The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and decentralized naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. DNS effectively gives human identifiable names to inhuman computer addresses.
We monitor DNS records and their values from 5 different major providers of DNS. These include Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, Level3 and Cisco OpenDNS to validate the state and distribution of you DNS record.
DNS Monitor Specifications:
| Location | Interval | DNS Providers | Available States |
|---|---|---|---|
| los-angeles-us | 5s | Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, Level3 and Cisco OpenDNS | Valid, Invalid |
| london-uk | 5s | Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, Level3 and Cisco OpenDNS | Valid, Invalid |
| sydney-au | 5s | Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, Level3 and Cisco OpenDNS | Valid, Invalid |
| tokyo-jp | 5s | Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, Level3 and Cisco OpenDNS | Valid, Invalid |
Monitoring a DNS Domain / Record
There are two steps to monitoring a DNS domain / records in Pingsphere.
- Create a Domain
- Create a Record
Creating a DNS Domain
The first step is to setup your domain. This is the root domain of your website or service. For example www.pingsphere.io is the website. pingsphere.io is the domain and www is a record in that domain.
Add your domain into DNS Domains. Right now this will not do anything. It will only allow you to create records that you would like to monitor.
Use the action bar to the right to view the domain where you can add records to be monitored.
Creating a DNS Record under a DNS Domain
Records are normally a key value pair, most commonly known to be a name and IP address. However there are many kinds of DNS record types we currently only support a common subset of them:
- A (ipv4)
- AAAA (ipv6)
- CNAME (DNS aliasing to a canonical name)
To create a record check click the Create DNS Record button in the top right. This will provide you a form to select which type of record you want to monitor.
When creating a monitor we will check 5 different DNS providers to validate the record you've configured.
We consider this statement to be how we check DNS:
I expect this domain to have this record with this value otherwise tell me that it's missing or incorrect and what its current advertised value is.
Once created you will see a consistency number and the time to live. The consistency number is a percentage of correct values from the 5 providers.
If it is not 100% then a provider is returning the wrong value and you would want to know about it.
Conclusion
Adding DNS monitors is a great way to monitor specific important records using Pingsphere. Doing so can give you insight into problems with customers connecting to your system and problems when DNS records are updated.