DNS monitors run a real lookup against the resolver you choose and alert when the record stops resolving. Expired zones, botched migrations and dying resolvers surface as a named alert instead of a vague outage.
A and AAAA keep your hosts findable, CNAME holds your aliases together, MX routes your mail, TXT carries SPF and domain verification, NS proves your delegation still points home.
Each monitor queries one record type on a schedule. The monitor stays up while the lookup returns at least one matching record, and goes down the moment it fails or comes back empty.
Every DNS monitor queries a DNS server you pick. Point one at a public resolver to see the internet's view of your zone, and another at the internal resolver your office and servers depend on.
When the two disagree, you have found the problem before anyone filed a ticket. The zone is fine, the office resolver is not, and the alert says which.
DNS failures rarely announce themselves. They arrive as a site that won't load, mail that silently queues and an API that times out, which sends the team debugging the wrong layer.
A dedicated DNS monitor with its own history turns the first question of an incident into a dashboard glance. Resolution time is charted per check, the same as response time on any other monitor.
Product domains, client domains, redirects and legacy zones. A monitor per critical record means a renamed nameserver or an expired zone gets caught in minutes.
Mail keeps flowing only while MX records resolve. When they vanish, senders queue silently for days before bouncing, so an immediate alert is the difference between a blip and lost mail.
Cutovers live and die on DNS. Watch the old record, the new record and both resolvers while the TTLs drain, and know the moment the world sees what you expect it to.
Each check performs an actual DNS lookup against the server you configured, not a lookup through a cached HTTP API. What the monitor sees is what a client using that resolver sees.
The check queries exactly the record type you picked. An A record that resolves while the MX is gone will not mask the mail problem, because those are two different monitors.
Split-horizon zones and office resolvers are only visible from inside the network. Your Checkmate instance is inside the network, so they get the same monitoring as public DNS.
Resolution time is recorded per check and charted over time. A resolver that grows slow under load shows a trend long before it starts refusing queries outright.
DNS monitoring runs scheduled lookups for a specific record and alerts you when the record stops resolving. Checkmate queries the resolver you choose and records the result plus the resolution time of every check.
A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT and NS records. Each monitor watches one hostname and record type pair, so a zone's critical records are typically covered by a handful of monitors.
Yes, per monitor. Point one monitor at a public resolver like 1.1.1.1 and another at your internal resolver, and you can tell a broken zone apart from a broken resolver at a glance.
It catches records that stop resolving, which covers many hijack and takeover scenarios. It does not compare returned values, so pair it with an HTTP monitor on the same host: if the record starts pointing somewhere wrong, the HTTP check fails on content or certificate.
Yes. Checks run from your self-hosted instance, so internal resolvers and split-horizon views that no hosted monitor can reach are fully monitorable.
Checkmate is one. It is open source under AGPL-3.0 and self-hosted, so you can monitor as many records and resolvers as you like for free.
Websites and APIs checked from 6 continents.
ICMP reachability for anything with an IP.
Databases, mail and SSH watched at the socket.
Handshake checks for ws:// and wss:// endpoints.
The standard health protocol, checked on schedule.
More than 100 game types over native protocols.
CPU, memory, disk and network via the Capture agent.
Container status, health checks and resource usage.
Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals on a schedule.
Certificate expiry caught before browsers complain.
Branded public pages served from your own instance.
12 native channels, from email to PagerDuty.
Every outage recorded, resolved and explained.
All featuresCheckmate is open source under AGPL-3.0. Self-host it and this feature ships free, on your servers, with your data.