Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At Catchpoint, our award-winning support team aims to be a partner, not just a gateway to the tool. Earlier this month when UltraDNS, a major DNS provider, went down, they found themselves faced with nine support tickets within one hour. Our customers were experiencing outages on their websites and online services. They needed urgent help from Catchpoint in understanding what was causing the disruption, so they could quickly resolve the situation.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is at the core of the engine that keeps the internet running. We have explained how DNS works and why it is critical to the functioning of the internet in our Synthetic Monitoring Guide. The DNS resolution relies on various components, such as the DNS resolvers, name servers, authoritative servers, and zone files, to function properly and the process typically takes milliseconds to complete.

On Wednesday 17th March, globally used DNS provider Network Solutions experienced the dreaded downtime we all hope to avoid. Starting at 4am Eastern time and continuing through to Thursday 18th with still no resolution, it’s affected thousands of people across the world. Network Solutions are the 4th biggest domain registrar in the world, with nearly 7 million users worldwide.

The vulnerability called SIGRed (CVE-2020-1350) has been around for 17 years, during which time it was present in Windows Server operating systems from version 2003 through 2019 and received a maximum severity rating of 10. It was finally patched in July 2020. As the vulnerability allows an attacker to perform remote code execution on Windows Server via DNS, it poses an extremely serious danger and can propagate over the network without user interaction.

Happy New Year! We want to kick off 2021 by announcing some improvements to DNS Check.

DNS is a critical component of your infrastructure, enabling your services to reach the endpoints they rely on and connecting your users to your web applications from anywhere in the world. In order to keep your DNS healthy and performant, you need complete visibility into both internal and external DNS resolution. Datadog is excited to announce new DNS monitoring features that help you troubleshoot DNS end-to-end, so you can ensure your applications’ performance and availability.

The most common problems and outages in a Kubernetes cluster come from coreDNS, so learning how to monitor coreDNS is crucial. Imagine that your frontend application suddenly goes down. After some time investigating, you discover it’s not resolving the backend endpoint because the DNS keeps returning 500 error codes. The sooner you can get to this conclusion, the faster you can recover your application.