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Never noticed DNS briefly went down, want alarms on DNS outages

Most monitoring looks only at HTTP, but DNS outages feel identical to customers and stay under the radar because resolver cache masks the pain. A dedicated DNS monitor covers both authoritative and resolver paths.

Try this first

  1. 1Set up DNS monitoring (DNSPerf, Better Stack, UptimeRobot, RIPE Atlas) that probes apex and MX records every minute from multiple regions.
  2. 2Monitor each authoritative NS record separately (ns1, ns2, ns3) so you see a single node fail while the zone overall still works.
  3. 3Alert on response content, not just status. An empty response or SERVFAIL differs from NXDOMAIN.
  4. 4Add DNSSEC validation in the monitor so you notice signing breaking before resolvers reject the record.
  5. 5Document the runbook: revert NS records to the old provider, short TTL required, contact at the DNS host.

When to bring us in

If you have no runbook or fallback DNS, we can set up a secondary zone at a second provider so a single host outage never takes everything down.

See also

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