DNS Monitoring for Both Sides
2011/11/11 4 Comments
DNS monitoring, like a coin, has two sides: “What does my DNS server say?” and “What does ‘public’ DNS say?” With NodePing server monitoring, you can ask both questions.
Our DNS check allows you to send a query of a specific type to your DNS server (or a public DNS server) and test the response against a string you define. For example, you can verify that your website domain resolves to your web server’s static IP address and have NodePing send you an email or SMS alert when either the server or the response fails.
DNS queries can be made for the following types and the response verified:
- A
- CNAME
- MX
- NS
- PTR
- SOA
- TXT
You can find more info on the DNS checks and our other check types in our documentation.
If you don’t have a NodePing account yet, try out our new DNS monitoring checks for free with a 15-day trial.
About Shawn
NodePing 
We really like the DNS checks, but have two questions:
1. How can we check for the presence of a domain? e.g. that the domain is registered and exists in DNS (not looking for any specific records)
2. How can we check for multiple expected answers – e.g. if we do an NS lookup we get 3 results back. How do we specify the 3 correct answers?
Thanks,
Chris
Chris,
1. Domains should return something when queried for ‘ANY’. If you leave the ‘DNS Server’ empty, we’ll query a public DNS server for the domain you put in the ‘Query’. Leave ‘Expected Response’ blank and you should get a ‘fail’ if the domain does not exist and a ‘pass’ if it does.
2. Multiple expected answers will take setting up multiple checks, one for each of the expected responses. We try to match the ‘Expected Response’ field to all the responses returned so three checks with the three different expected responses should cover that.
Hope that helps,
Shawn
Hi Shawn,
I have tried quering the domain for ANY but it doesn’t work. Currently the domain is non-existant but the test is passing. This is despite an public nslookups we have tried failing. If we test for the existance of a specific MX record on the domain then that fails (as we would expect it to).
Chris
Chris,
That’s odd. What domain are you querying? If you’d rather reply privately, please send an email to support@nodeping.com and I’ll get right on it.
Shawn