Protect Your Website from Silent DNS Failures
DNS is the internet's address book—when it fails or returns wrong information, your website becomes unreachable even though your servers are running perfectly. DNS issues are particularly dangerous because they're invisible from your infrastructure: servers report healthy status while users worldwide can't find your site. DNS monitoring ensures your domain names resolve correctly and alerts you immediately when DNS problems occur.
What is DNS Monitoring?
DNS monitoring continuously verifies that your domain names resolve to the correct IP addresses and that all DNS records remain configured properly. Our system regularly queries DNS servers for your domains, validates responses against expected values, tracks DNS propagation, measures resolution times, and alerts you when DNS records change unexpectedly or fail to resolve.
DNS is foundational infrastructure—when it breaks, everything breaks, often in ways that are difficult to diagnose without proper monitoring.
Why DNS Monitoring is Essential
Detect Unauthorized Changes
DNS hijacking, accidental misconfigurations, or unauthorized modifications can redirect your traffic to malicious servers or cause complete service disruption. DNS monitoring catches these changes immediately.
Prevent Silent Outages
Your servers can be perfectly healthy while DNS failures make your website completely inaccessible. Traditional uptime monitoring from your own network might miss DNS issues visible only to external users.
Verify DNS Propagation
After DNS changes, records must propagate through the global DNS infrastructure. DNS monitoring verifies propagation completes successfully and all DNS servers return correct records.
Catch Expired Records
TTL misconfigurations or forgotten temporary DNS changes can cause records to expire or stop working. DNS monitoring detects these issues before users are affected.
Key Features
Record Validation
Configure expected IP addresses for each DNS record. Alert when responses don't match expectations.
Change Detection
Track DNS record changes over time. Alert immediately when records are modified, added, or deleted.
Multi-Resolver
Query from multiple public DNS resolvers (Google, Cloudflare, OpenDNS) to verify global consistency.
🚨 Real Example: The DNS Hijacking Attack
A marketing agency's domain registrar credentials were compromised. Attackers changed the DNS records to point to a phishing site. The agency discovered the issue 6 hours later after multiple clients reported suspicious-looking pages. By then, their reputation was severely damaged and several clients had exposed credentials.
What would have prevented this:
DNS monitoring would have alerted within 60 seconds of the unauthorized DNS change. The agency could have immediately locked their registrar account and reverted the changes before significant damage.
Impact: 6 hours of downtime prevented, client trust maintained, reputation protected.
Getting Started with DNS Monitoring
Add Your Domain
Enter your domain name (example.com). The system will automatically detect and monitor all critical DNS records.
Configure Expected Values
Set the expected IP addresses or values for A, AAAA, MX, and other records. You'll be alerted if values change.
Enable Notifications
Configure instant alerts via email, Slack, or SMS for DNS failures or unauthorized changes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your website becomes completely unreachable even if servers are running perfectly. Users see 'DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN' or 'Server not found' errors. Email stops working. All services tied to your domain go offline immediately. DNS failures affect 100% of users, unlike partial server outages.
Yes. This is called a 'silent outage.' Your web servers report healthy status, your monitoring dashboard shows green, but users worldwide can't reach your site because DNS isn't resolving your domain to the correct IP address. This is why DNS monitoring is separate from website monitoring.
DNS monitoring continuously checks that your domain resolves to expected IP addresses. If someone hijacks your DNS, changes your A records, or points your domain to wrong servers, you get alerted immediately. This catches both malicious attacks and accidental misconfigurations.
At minimum, monitor A records (IPv4), AAAA records (IPv6), and MX records (email). Also monitor TXT records for email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), CNAME records for CDN configurations, and NS records for nameserver integrity. Different services break if different record types fail.
DNS changes can take 24-72 hours to fully propagate globally, depending on TTL (Time To Live) settings. However, most DNS servers update within 1-4 hours. DNS monitoring helps verify your changes have propagated and alerts you if old records persist longer than expected.
Common causes include: DNS provider outages, expired domain registrations, hijacking/unauthorized changes, misconfigured nameservers, DNSSEC validation failures, DDoS attacks on DNS infrastructure, or accidental record deletions. DNS monitoring catches all these scenarios.