[151907] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Distributed DNS/etc checking
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Weiss)
Wed Apr 4 00:11:38 2012
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2012 23:12:49 -0500
From: Bill Weiss <houdini+nanog@clanspum.net>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <CAPQUSnNTBgatdqtH8xtCubHrY0wPSv2oL+8xSZf9E58qcM3spg@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Todd Snyder(todd@borked.ca)@Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 12:08:06PM -0400:
> Good day all,
>
> There have been a few instances where we've wanted to check our external
> DNS servers from various external networks, so we've utilized the existing
> looking glass tools provided by many of you. However, it's a very manual
> process, given that all LG's I've found say no automating/scripting. If we
> want to check from a couple dozen sites around the world, it's a lot of
> clicking and typing and collecting. If we wanted to create an tool that
> our NOC could use to verify our services, we would need something we could
> script. Ideally, we'd be able to run this constantly to do health checks
> on our services, but one step at a time.
To suggest a service that I have no relation to (other than being a happy
customer), have you looked at Pingdom [http://www.pingdom.com/] ? I'm not
using the DNS check type, but I have a dozen or so HTTP checks there.
Their system is super simple, no frills, and is priced like it :) It
looks like you can list a domain to test, a server to check and what
result you expect. They run checks from a bunch of different places (40
servers, seemingly half in the US, right now). Pricing at the low scale
is $6/check/year, which is pretty compelling even against running some
VPSes if you aren't checking too many sites.
--
Bill Weiss
