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  6. DNS servers overview

DNS servers overview

Note: Uptrends is introducing a new navigation menu and Monitor Editor UI. Your interface may look different from the documentation as we reflect these changes. The documentation accurately explains how the features work, even if your interface looks different.

Monitoring your DNS is a great way of ensuring that your users can easily access your website and services quickly, and securely.

Why use a DNS monitor?

This check allows you to perform various queries on a DNS name server. The most common thing to check is whether your domain name (www.yourcompany.com) is still pointing to the IP address of your web server. Your provider’s name server is the primary, first-hand source of this information. By monitoring this DNS query directly, Uptrends will detect any DNS problems, even before your website becomes unavailable for your visitors and customers.

Uptrends’ DNS monitor lets you perform extensive DNS health checks: verifying website domain names (A and CNAME records), mail server domain name mappings (MX records), DNS zone delegation (NS records), authoritative DNS zone information (SOA records), and other DNS data contained in TXT records (including SPF information for email authentication).

A specific case for using a DNS monitor is Checking a serial number in an SOA record.

Setting up a DNS monitor

  1. Go to Monitoring > Monitor setup +.
  2. Set your monitor type to DNS.
  3. Enter monitoring details, such as Name and Check interval.
  4. Select your IP version. If you are testing using IPv6, you can choose to use only checkpoints with native IPv6 support. Otherwise, checks will run from all selected checkpoints, using native IPv6 where available and IPv6 emulation on IPv4 checkpoints..
  5. Fill in the DNS server information, such as domain name or IP address of the DNS server to test, for example n1s.yourprovider.com.
  6. Verify the Port. Check if your DNS server uses the default port 53. Otherwise, replace it with your custom port number.
  7. Select the DNS query type. Uptrends supports the following:
  • A Record
  • AAAA Record
  • CNAME Record
  • MX Record
  • NS Record
  • SOA Record
  • SRV Record
  • TXT Record
  • Root Server

  1. Specify the domain name (for example, www.yourdomain.com) to query in the Test value field.

  2. Provide the Expected result. If you are testing the domain name of your website (an A Record query), fill in the IP address of your domain name. Uptrends service verifies that the response from the DNS query matches the IP address.

Tip: If your domain name has multiple IP addresses, you can use a regular expression to match multiple values. If no response is expected it is also possible to match for a DNS response code instead (for example, NXDomain). Example: 1.2.3.4|5.6.7.8
  1. Click Save to confirm changes.
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