We're going to perform software updates to DNS Check's website on Sunday, December 30th between 11:00 pm and 11:30 pm UTC. We anticipate that the updates will cause 5-10 minutes of downtime for our website.

If you're using our API for DNS record monitoring, then we recommend scheduling a maintenance window within your monitoring system which covers this window.

Back in 2016, we added support for monitoring wildcard DNS records. Wildcard DNS records are used to serve requests for otherwise non-existent domain names. For example, if you created a wildcard record for *.example.com, but not a foo.example.com record, queries for foo.example.com would receive the IP addresses specified for *.example.com in response.

Today we're pleased to announce that we've extended our support for using wildcards in DNS records monitoring. DNS Check now allows you to specify a wildcard (*) in place of some DNS record values, such as an A record's IP address to indicate that any value is acceptable, but the record must exist.

Wildcard values are supported in the following areas:

• A and AAAA records may have an IP address of * specified.
• CNAME records may have a value of * specified to indicate that they may point to any domain.
• MX records may have an exchange of * specified to indicate that any exchange is acceptable.
• NS records may have a value of * specified to indicate that any name server is acceptable.
• PTR records may have a value of * specified to indicate that any value is acceptable.

We've moved the Sunday, February 25th maintenance window that was announced in the previous post to take place on Monday, February 26th between 16:00 and 17:00 UTC.

The maintenance window was rescheduled so that mitigations for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities can be put in place at the same time as the hardware upgrade.

We anticipate that this maintenance will cause 5-15 minutes of downtime for our website.

We're going to migrate DNS Check's website to new and more powerful hardware on Sunday, February 25th starting at 1:00 am UTC. We anticipate that this migration will cause 5-10 minutes of downtime for our website.

If you're using our API for DNS record monitoring, then we recommend scheduling a maintenance window within your monitoring system which covers this window.

We just finished refactoring the code that we use for integrating DNS Check with services like Slack and PagerDuty. It felt good to take some of the bespoke code that had accumulated over the past couple years as integrations got added in and generalize it.

These updates will allow us to more easily add and update integrations in the future.

You shouldn't notice any difference in how existing DNS Check integrations work.

We're going to migrate DNS Check's website to new hardware on Thursday, October 13th starting at 12:00 am UTC. We anticipate that this migration will cause 5-10 minutes of downtime for our website.

If you're using our API for DNS record monitoring, then we recommend scheduling a maintenance window within your monitoring system which covers this window.

Wildcard DNS records are used to serve requests for otherwise non-existent domain names.

For example, the following DNS zone file excerpt contains two non-wildcard A records along with a wildcard record:

; Name            Record Type     IP Address
example.com.      A               1.2.3.4
www.example.com.  A               1.2.3.4
*.example.com.    A               5.6.7.8

If you look up the www.example.com A record in the above recordset, you'll receive a response of 1.2.3.4, since explicit records take precedence over wildcard records. If you look up the foo.example.com DNS record, you'll receive a response of 5.6.7.8, since there is only a wildcard record for foo.example.com.

Wildcard DNS records are handy, but how do you monitor them? Two options come to mind:

We're excited to announce that we've integrated DNS Check with Basecamp 3. This integration enables you to receive notifications in the Basecamp Campfire chat of your choice each time a DNS record transitions between passing and failing:

Integrating your DNS Check account with Basecamp 3 is simple, and only takes about a minute. See the DNS Check / Basecamp 3 integration Guide to get started.

We've added CNAME DNS load balancer monitoring to DNS Check.

DNS load balancers distribute load for performance and/or redundancy purposes.

You can also use DNS Check to monitor A record and AAAA record based load balancers:

We've added SPF resource record monitoring to DNS Check.

SPF records are used to control which IP addresses and services are authorized to send email for a domain name.

SPF records are unusual in that they can actually be published using either of the following resource record types: