Introduction: The Importance of DNS in Today’s Digital Ecosystem In today’s digital world, a business’s online success relies heavily on a strong infrastructure. At the heart of that infrastructure is DNS (Domain Name System). DNS acts like the internet’s phonebook which translates easy-to-remember domain names (like www.example.com) into machine-readable IP
The outages continue for Network Solutions. Dotcom-Monitor is currently tracking a Network Solutions email deliverability issue due to email blacklisting, as well as a separate DNS issue that occurred earlier this year.
Amazon Down! – Dotcom-Monitor is tracking an Amazon.com website outage that started at approximately 1:55pm CDT August 19, 2013. To test the current status of Amazon click here.
New York Times Website Down – The New York Times online publication NYTimes.com suffered a website outage late Wednesday morning, Aug. 13, 2013.
Aug. 1, 2013 – Dotcom-Monitor tracked an Akamai DNS outage today.
Dotcom-Monitor clients that utilize Akamai may have received error messages associated with the Akamai DNS outage lasting from 5-7 minutes starting at approximately 11:01 am CDT.
The Akamai DNS outage, though brief, is only one of several high-profile DNS outage issues that has occurred in the past year. In the recent past, Dotcom-Monitor has detected several high-profile DNS outages for its clients, including…
The GoDaddy DNS outage and Paternity Test: Who’s your GoDaddy? Its another episode of the Maury Povich Paternity Test on DNS Outage TV yesterday. Having just written about a major AT&T DNS outage on Aug. 15, here we are again on Sept 10, 2012 witnessing the GoDaddy DNS outage. Millions of website and email users DNS look-up process is playing out like a Maury Povich TV episode of paternity testing gone wrong. First time visitors to a GoDaddy website type the GoDaddy URL into their browser and the answer from the DNS comes back “This aint your GoDaddy.” Or something like that.
To Cache or Not-to-Cache – that is the DNS Monitoring Question
Firstly, it is not generally well-known that external-based HTTP request-type website monitoring, like coffee at your local java joint, comes in different “grades” – cache-based and non-cache based. Dotcom-Monitor employs non-cached monitoring, which propagates through the full DNS process with each monitoring instance. Cache-based monitoring (used by many basic monitoring services) does not propagate through the DNS process and misses DNS issues.
How to Effectively Monitor for the next DNS Outage Situation
In the case of the AT&T DNS outage issue there are several key factors that help to speed up Time-to-Repair (TTR), or avoiding downtime.
Doing DNS Monitoring Right: The AT&T DNS Outage: The AT&T domain name server (DNS) outage of Aug. 15, 2012 exemplifies why a “non-cache based” method for monitoring of websites is important for mission-critical websites. Firstly, a bit of a review. The most common, basic form of website monitoring is conducted using a synthetic browser (not an actual browser), which connects to the target server via an HTTP request process. A number of server-focused processes, such as the availability of the target server, the time it takes to load the HTML file for the website from the server, and the capability to detect keywords within the HTML file are checked via the use of a synthetic browser using an HTTP request process.
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