It's 2026, and DNS Check now has a dark mode. Yes, we noticed the year. Better late than dazzling our users at 2 a.m. when an MX record decides to misbehave.

The 2 a.m. Use Case

If you've ever been paged for a DNS issue, you know the routine: the alert fires, you open your laptop, and your monitoring dashboard greets you with a screen full of white. Dark mode is a small quality-of-life improvement that you don't think much about during the day and are very glad for at 2 a.m.

Choosing a Theme

A new theme toggle now appears in the top navigation bar on every page of the site, whether you're signed in or not. It has three options:

  • System: follow whatever your operating system is set to. This is the default, so if you've already configured your OS for dark mode at night, DNS Check follows along.
  • Light: the original look, for anyone who prefers it or works in a sunny window.
  • Dark: the new look, for late nights, low-light offices, and anyone with strong opinions about IDE themes.

Screenshot of the theme dropdown menu in the DNS Check navigation bar showing the three modes: System, Light, and Dark

DNS Check remembers your selection across sessions and devices when you're signed in, and stores it locally in your browser when you're not. There's no settings page to dig through: pick the option you want from the navigation bar, and you're done.

What Got the Dark Treatment

Adding dark mode to a mature web application turned out to be a much larger project than inverting a few background colors. Every badge, button, form field, modal, tab, dropdown, and chart needed to look right in both themes, with enough contrast to stay readable.

A short and incomplete list of what we updated:

  • Application UI: dashboards, DNS record groups, settings pages, modals, tables, and forms across the entire signed-in experience.
  • Notifications and integrations: refreshed light and dark logos for Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Pingdom, Nagios, Splunk On-Call, Jira Service Management, and others, so each integration looks correct against either background.
  • Billing: we styled the Stripe Elements payment forms for dark mode, so the credit card form on the billing page matches the rest of the page.
  • Product tour: the tour for new accounts respects the active theme, so first-time users get a consistent look.
  • Blog and status page: this blog and the DNS Check status page have their own theme toggle and follow the same preference.

We also took the opportunity to extract a shared color palette that both the Rails application and the Jekyll sites use, so colors stay consistent across every part of DNS Check.

A Note for Screenshot Readers

If you read our blog or documentation in dark mode, you'll notice that we dim screenshots slightly so they don't punch a bright rectangle into the middle of an otherwise dark page. The images themselves don't change: we apply a subtle brightness filter only when the surrounding page is dark.

Get Started

Dark mode is live across every page of DNS Check. Click the new icon in the top right and pick your preference. You don't need to change any configuration, and your existing notification and monitoring settings stay as they are.

If you're not yet using DNS Check, create a free account and start monitoring your DNS records.