Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In an era marked by escalating cyber threats, Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure security has become a key concern for IT organizations worldwide. Attacks related to DNS infrastructure, such as DNS hijacking, DNS tunneling, and DNS amplification, are on the rise. Many organizations find themselves questioning the robustness of their DNS security protocols.

In the early 90s, it was easier—and more affordable—to register a domain name with the same as a company’s. Now, it requires other services to register it and keep it from potential competitors. Despite the process change, registering a domain name is still one of the most crucial aspects of supporting a business online. This blog details the behind-the-scenes processes on how domain names become accessible content to users, starting with what a Domain Name System (DNS) is.

A domain is a human-readable address that helps to identify a specific location on the internet. It is part of the Domain Name System (DNS), a hierarchical system that translates domain names into numeric IP addresses, allowing computers to locate and connect to each other over the network.

With the vast amount of data that is transmitted through the internet, it is essential to have a reliable connection. However, sometimes even the most stable connection can experience issues, one of which is the "DNS Server Not Responding" error. This error occurs when your device is unable to establish a connection with the DNS server, thereby depriving you of access to the internet.

As you probably know, Oh Dear is run by a small but capable team. One of the advantages of being small is that we can implement stuff pretty quickly: there’s no red tape, and our code base is very healthy. So, when our users have feature requests that make sense to add to Oh Dear, we can move fast. In the past month, we implemented two smallish feature requests for our DNS check we got through support. Here’s what our new DNS settings screens look like.

In the world of the Internet, where every click, request, and data transfer relies on seamless connectivity, Domain Name System (DNS) issues can be the silent disruptors that bring the entire digital ecosystem to a halt. As organizations and individuals become increasingly dependent on the Internet for their day-to-day operations, understanding and troubleshooting DNS problems have become essential skills for IT professionals.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the backbone of the internet. Proper DNS configuration is essential for seamless internet connectivity and plays a central role in enhancing website performance. In this guide, we will explore DNS configuration and its importance and provide step-by-step instructions for configuring DNS servers on various platforms, as well as client settings.

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced you to the key metrics you should be monitoring to ensure that you get optimal performance from CoreDNS running in your Kubernetes clusters. In Part 2, we showed you some tools you can use to monitor CoreDNS. In this post, we’ll show you how you can use Datadog to monitor metrics, logs, and traces from CoreDNS alongside telemetry from the rest of your cluster, including the infrastructure it runs on.

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at key metrics you should monitor to understand the performance of your CoreDNS servers. In this post, we’ll show you how to collect and visualize these metrics. We’ll also explore how CoreDNS logging works and show you how to collect CoreDNS logs to get even deeper visibility into your Deployment.

CoreDNS is an open source DNS server that can resolve requests for internet domain names and provide service discovery within a Kubernetes cluster. CoreDNS is the default DNS provider in Kubernetes as of v1.13. Though it can be used independently of Kubernetes, this series will focus on its role in providing Kubernetes service discovery, which simplifies cluster networking by enabling clients to access services using DNS names rather than IP addresses.