How we do DNS monitoring

When you add a domain to our platform, you'll be able to choose whether to enable DNS monitoring or keep it turned off, don't worry, you can always come back and enable it at a later date too.

TL;DR

• We don't use any third-party systems or API's, this is one of the reasons our DNS monitoring is reliable.
• Your domain's DNS is automatically monitored at consistent intervals, set by you.
• If you're using Cloudflare, then we automatically ignore record changes for A and AAAA records.
• Monitored DNS record types can be enabled or disabled.

How our DNS monitoring works

DNS records are an important part of any domain and ensuring that they're in-sync and working is also important for the availability of your website, if they were to suddenly stop working because they changed, potential customers won't be able to visit your site.

For this reason, our DNS monitoring is pretty simple and should be pretty easy to follow:

• We scan your domain, for example example.com and attempt to obtain all DNS record types for each category.
• We store data about each check, and when the next check is performed we'll compare their values against the previous check.
• If either the: type, host or value are different, we'll construct a notification and send it to you with the new records, this is marked as a DNS changed notification.
  • When this notification is sent, by default, you'll only be able to see these changes up until the next check is conducted (giving you a short period to log in and look, unless you've got your check frequency quite slow), this is because we compare current against the previous DNS checks, you can retain the changed records by enabling the Enable changed DNS records retention setting in your domain's DNS settings.

When first adding your domain and enabling this feature, it may take up-to 3 checks for you to see all information, this is because we group checks by current and previous, and when first enabling the feature there aren't any "previous" checks recorded yet.

Monitored record types

Trying to figure out all of the DNS record types that need to be monitored can be quite challenging, especially if you aren't quite familiar with all of the possible records that can be monitored.

We'll monitor up-to 10 different DNS record types, and each of these can be disabled or enabled independently per domain.

Record types that we will monitor

1. A
2. AAAA
3. CAA
4. CNAME
5. MX
6. NS
7. SOA
8. SRV
9. TXT
10. PTR

Cloudflare supported

So many people are using Cloudflare nowadays to manage their domain's DNS records, for this reason, Cloudflare is likely to be changing your domain's A and AAAA records quite often, and, you don't want to be receiving alerts for these changes when this is expected behaviour.

We've thought of this and have put some rules and checks in place so that:

• If your domain's NS records returned contain the word "cloudflare" and are either an A or AAAA record

Then, we'll automatically ignore any DNS changes to these records.

If you're monitoring any other records through Cloudflare, then you can independently disable these monitored DNS record types at any time.

Simplicity in monitoring

Whilst DNS monitoring is quite important for any webmaster, simplicity and not relying on third-party providers is also important too. This means that we aim to continue to provide just the right balance between performance, reliability and accuracy.

If you notice that you're getting alerts for DNS changes and haven't seen any changes to your DNS records, consider turning off certain record types that you're not using on your domain.