About DNSMON

Overview

The RIPE NCC DNS Monitoring Service (DNSMON) provides a comprehensive, objective and up-to-date overview of the quality of the service offered by high-level Domain Name System (DNS) servers. It is an active measurement service that uses our RIPE Atlas active measurement network to provide an up-to-date service overview of all DNS root and many Top-Level Domain (TLD) name servers. An important feature is the ability to view historical data, which allows quick analysis of both past and present DNS issues.

DNSMON measures DNS performance between sites that host RIPE Atlas anchors and those where DNS servers are installed. The high number of probes and the method of presenting the results are unique. The information is updated as soon as new data points are received.

Documentation

The documentation page contains the detailed description of the service and its features.

A paper about DNSMON was presented at the Tenth International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection in Brussels in June 2015 with the title "Visualization and Monitoring for the Identification and Analysis of DNS Issues".

Participating

If you would like to have your ccTLD or Tier-1 ENUM zone monitored, please check whether it meets the criteria outlined in the relevant RIPE policy document and contact us at atlas@ripe.net.

Note: all zones monitored by DNSMON use a common set of measurement types, frequencies and vantage points. For reasons of consistency it isn't possible to customise or change the configuration for a specific zone.

If your zone does not meet the criteria, or if you would like to customise the measurements which are run against your zone, you can make use of DomainMON. DomainMON uses your RIPE Atlas credits to monitor your zone and provides comparable functionality to DNSMON. You can learn more in the DomainMON RIPE Labs article.

History

Development of the service started in 2003. During the development phase, we offered the service free of charge to the entire Internet community. This changed on 1 March 2005, when it became a regular production service.

In 2012, the RIPE NCC membership approved a Charging Scheme that says DNSMON must become a member service from 1 January 2013.

Given the popularity of this service and the looming decommissioning of the TTM network, in 2013 we decided to start a new project that would use the RIPE Atlas network to collect the DNS monitoring information. We also revamped the user interface to use a more modern visualisation engine, with more interactive features. In early 2014 this implementation replaced the previous one. Please see the documentation for a description between this implementation and the previous one.

How to Contact Us

Please send bug reports to atlas@ripe.net. Feature requests can be proposed and discussed on the RIPE DNS working group.