DNS monitoring verifies that your domain names resolve correctly and within acceptable time frames. DNS is a critical dependency for virtually every internet service — if DNS resolution fails, your service is effectively offline even if the servers are running perfectly.
DNS monitoring checks include resolution availability (does the DNS query return a result?), resolution time (how long does the query take?), record correctness (does the A/AAAA/CNAME record point to the expected IP?), and propagation monitoring (have DNS changes propagated to all nameservers?).
DNS failures can be caused by misconfigured DNS records, nameserver outages, domain expiration, DNSSEC validation errors, or DDoS attacks targeting DNS infrastructure. These issues are particularly insidious because they affect all users regardless of your server health. Hyperping monitors DNS resolution as part of its comprehensive monitoring to detect DNS-related outages.
