DNS monitoring and
drift detection
Pin the value a record should resolve to and Status Harbor tells you the minute it changes. A, AAAA, CNAME, MX and TXT records, checked every minute from 9 regions.
DNS breaks quietly, then breaks everything
DNS is the one layer with no deploy log. A record gets repointed during a migration and never reverted. A registrar UI edit drops an MX record. A TXT record carrying an SPF policy or a domain-verification token gets overwritten by the next change. Nothing crashes — the record just resolves to the wrong answer, and email starts bouncing or traffic starts landing on an old server.
An HTTP monitor will not catch most of this. The site still loads; it just loads from somewhere it should not. The only reliable signal is checking the record itself against the value you expect.
What a DNS monitor watches
- Record value match — set the expected answer for an A, AAAA, CNAME, MX or TXT record. The monitor opens an incident the moment the resolved value stops matching.
- Propagation across regions — resolve from up to 9 regions. When a change is halfway propagated, you see exactly which resolvers still serve the old answer.
- Mail and verification records — pin the MX records your email depends on and the TXT records that carry SPF, DKIM and domain-ownership tokens, so a silent overwrite becomes an alert instead of a support ticket.
Catch drift within a minute
Add a DNS monitor, choose the record type, enter the hostname and the value it should return. Status Harbor resolves it every minute and alerts to Slack, Telegram, email or a webhook the moment the answer drifts — and closes the incident automatically once the record is back to the expected value.
DNS checks share the same dashboard, incident timeline and alert routing as your HTTP, TCP, SSL and UDP monitors. One product, one bill, no separate "DNS tier".
Frequently asked questions
Which DNS record types can Status Harbor monitor?
A, AAAA, CNAME, MX and TXT records. You set the expected value and the monitor alerts when the resolved answer stops matching it.
What is DNS drift?
DNS drift is any unintended change to a record: an A record repointed during a migration and never reverted, an MX record dropped by a registrar UI edit, a TXT record for SPF or domain verification overwritten. A DNS monitor pins the expected value and flags the moment reality diverges from it.
Can it check propagation across regions?
Yes. Status Harbor resolves the record from up to 9 regions across 6 continents. If a change has propagated to some resolvers but not others, you see exactly which regions are still serving the old answer.
How often does a DNS monitor check?
Every minute, the same cadence as every other monitor. A record change is caught within a minute of taking effect, not on the next hourly or daily sweep.
Related
- SSL certificate monitoring — DNS drift is a common cause of failed ACME renewals.
- TCP port monitoring — confirm the host a record points at is actually accepting connections.
- Private network monitoring — watch internal resolvers and in-cluster CoreDNS for drift.