Uplance Monitor types DNS
Know when a DNS record changes
Uplance resolves the record you name and compares the answer to the value you expect. A record that resolves to the wrong thing is not a healthy record.
Free for 10 monitors · no credit card
The problem
Your site is up, and half your users are reaching an old server because one A record was never updated — or your mail stopped arriving because an MX record was edited during an unrelated change.
DNS mistakes are quiet, they are often made by someone outside the team, and they survive for as long as nobody thinks to check.
What the check looks at
Any common record type
A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT or NS — you pick which one this monitor watches.
The expected value
Give the value it should contain and the monitor goes down when the answer no longer matches, not just when it disappears.
Empty answers
A record that resolves to nothing is reported as down, with the record type named in the alert.
What it saw
The records returned are kept with the check, so you can see what it changed from and to.
And the alert actually arrives
Most monitoring tools are fine until the one time the alert doesn't arrive. Uplance is built so that can't happen quietly.
- Every alert is written to an outbox before it is sent, and retried for about fifty minutes. A restart doesn't lose it.
- Once a week, a real test event is sent through every channel you've configured, and you're told which ones failed.
- If the alert pipeline is in trouble, the dashboard says so — it isn't buried in a log file.
- If the checker itself stops, the health endpoint returns 503 so an outside heartbeat can page you, and your status page says monitoring has stopped instead of showing stale green.
Common questions
- Can I watch a TXT record, for SPF or a verification?
- Yes. Pick TXT and give a fragment of the value you expect. It is a practical way to notice that an SPF or DKIM record was overwritten, before mail starts bouncing.
- Will it catch an NS change — a domain moved to another provider?
- Watch the NS record with your current nameservers as the expected value. If someone repoints the domain, that monitor goes down.
- Does it alert on propagation while I am making a planned change?
- Put the monitor in maintenance for the window and nothing is sent. Outside a window, flapping between two answers raises one flapping alert rather than one per flip.
- What about the domain's expiry date?
- That is watched too, automatically, for any monitor with a hostname — with warnings at 30, 7 and 1 days left.
Also monitored
Know it's down before your customers do.
10 monitors, 30 days of history, no credit card