Datadog’s new capabilities for monitoring DNS provide visibility into the health of business-critical apps

Datadog announced new capabilities for monitoring DNS. These new features allow engineers to troubleshoot DNS issues that affect the performance and availability of web applications and backend microservices.

Engineers today rely on performant DNS resolution in two ways: to make their user-facing applications globally accessible on the Internet, and to facilitate communication between the backend services on which these applications are built. Thus, when DNS performance issues inevitably arise, internally or on the third-party provider side, it often leads to downstream failure that impacts the end-user experience.

Datadog’s DNS monitoring capabilities now allow customers to monitor key performance metrics about both internal and external DNS resolution to maintain efficient service networking and availability.

“DNS is the backbone of the Internet, so its performance has a direct effect on the bottom line of every web application,” said Ilan Rabinovitch, Vice President, Product and Community, Datadog.

“We have built end to end DNS monitoring to provide comprehensive visibility into the health and availability of business-critical applications both for service discovery and user experience.”

“Maintaining performant service communication is critical for ensuring our customers are able to best support their customers through our platform, so we needed a way to detect when DNS issues occurred – quickly and reliably,” said Vicente De Luca, Principal Engineer at Zendesk.

“With Datadog’s new DNS monitoring solution, we can map DNS failure to poor application health, reducing our MTTR and filling a long-standing gap in our infrastructure visibility.”

These new DNS monitoring capabilities extend Datadog’s Network Performance Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring capabilities by helping customers detect when poor internal DNS resolution leads to network and application issues in real time, and when external DNS resolution is affecting end-user experience due to incorrect and poorly performing resolution.

Functionalities include:

• Assessing the performance of all internal DNS queries, transactions, and managed services in one view
• Quickly isolating servers with the highest response time or error rate to incoming requests
• Tracking the resolution time and accessibility of managed domains
• Identifying regional DNS outages and mismatched records
• Correlating DNS queries with application performance and cross microservice communication