Points your root domain at a server IP. Edit the wrong octet and the whole site drops.
DNS monitoring
DNS is the switchboard for your entire site and email. PulseStack watches the record you choose and alerts you when it no longer contains the value you expect, or disappears altogether - catching accidental edits, failed changes and modifications you never authorised.
Free plan, no card required - 5 monitors and HTTP checks to start. DNS monitoring on every paid plan.
Live DNS resolution via Google and Cloudflare - PulseStack watches these records for unexpected changes.
Most monitoring tells you a page is down after the damage is done. A DNS monitor works one layer earlier. You tell PulseStack what a record should contain, and every check confirms the live answer still contains it.
When the two stop matching - an edit, a failed change, an unexpected modification - you know within one interval, not when a customer emails to say the site is gone.
Points your root domain at a server IP. Edit the wrong octet and the whole site drops.
The IPv6 equivalent of an A record. Easy to forget, easy to leave stale.
Aliases one hostname to another. A broken CNAME breaks subdomains and CDNs.
Routes your email. A single wrong MX priority and inbound mail bounces.
Holds SPF, DKIM and verification strings. Lose one and email lands in spam.
Delegates authority for your zone. Change these and you can lose the domain entirely.
DNS failures are quiet. Nothing errors in your app - the traffic simply never arrives. Here is how it shows up.
An A record edited to the wrong IP resolves to nothing, or to someone else's server. Visitors see a blank page or a stranger's site, and nothing in your app logs explains why - because the traffic never reached you.
A fat-fingered MX priority or a dropped SPF TXT record and inbound mail starts bouncing while outbound lands in spam. You often only find out when a customer phones to ask why their emails went unanswered.
You repoint DNS for a cutover, one record does not propagate as planned, and half your users hit the old host while half hit the new one. Sessions break, carts empty, and the rollback is a guessing game.
A compromised registrar login or a colleague in the wrong panel rewrites a record. Without a watcher on the expected value, an unexpected DNS modification can sit live for hours before anyone notices.
Enter a hostname, pin the expected value, and you are covered.
Enter the hostname and choose the record type you care about - A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT or NS.
Tell PulseStack what the record should contain, and every check looks for it. Leave it blank to be alerted only if the record disappears.
PulseStack looks up the record from multiple locations, as often as every 5 minutes, and checks whether any record contains your expected value.
When no record contains your expected value, or the record disappears, we fire an alert down every channel you've wired up.
Every interval, PulseStack resolves your record from multiple locations and checks the live answer for your expected value. Match, and the monitor stays green. No match, and it flips - and the alert goes out.
A failed check is re-checked a few seconds later, so one flaky lookup does not wake you at 3am. We only alert once the mismatch is confirmed.
Watch DNS alongside everything else that keeps you online - one account, one dashboard, one set of alert rules.
Watch status codes and response time on any URL.
Confirm a word is present - or absent - in the response.
Check a host accepts TCP connections.
Verify a specific service port is open and listening.
Check an endpoint with your own method, headers and body.
Get alerted when a scheduled job stops checking in.
Alert when a record stops containing the value you expect.
Alerts before a certificate or domain registration lapses.
Route DNS alerts to wherever your team already lives. Eight native channels, no glue code.
SMS alerts are included on Team and Enterprise.
You hold DNS for dozens of clients across as many registrars. A DNS monitor per zone means you hear about a bad edit before the client does - and can prove you caught it.
Cutovers live and die on DNS. Set the expected records for the new host and get alerted if they go missing or stop matching, instead of refreshing dig in a terminal.
SPF, DKIM and MX live in DNS. Watch the TXT and MX records that keep mail flowing and get alerted when one stops matching.
Set the expected value and let PulseStack keep watch.
The dig-in-a-terminal approach
Pinned, multi-location, always on
Watching the page, not the plumbing
PulseStack does the middle column - and the uptime column - from one account.
DNS record monitoring checks the DNS records on your domains at regular intervals and alerts you when one goes wrong. Each PulseStack™ DNS monitor watches one record type (A, AAAA, MX, NS, CNAME or TXT) and alerts you when no record contains the value you expect, or when the record disappears if you have not set a value. Checks run up to every 5 minutes. This catches misconfigurations and unauthorised changes that move a record away from its expected value before they affect your users.
Unexpected DNS changes happen for several reasons. A compromised registrar account allows an attacker to modify records directly. Misconfigured infrastructure-as-code deployments can overwrite production records during a staging push. Shared hosting panels sometimes allow one tenant to affect another's DNS. CDN or load balancer migrations that do not update all records leave orphaned entries. Third-party services that you granted DNS access to may modify records during their own updates. Each scenario produces different symptoms but the same outcome: broken services.
At minimum, monitor A records (they point your domain to your server), MX records (they route your email), and NS records (they control who is authoritative for your zone). For comprehensive coverage, also monitor CNAME records used for subdomains and CDN routing, and TXT records that contain SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies for email authentication. Each PulseStack DNS monitor watches one record type, so add a monitor for each record you rely on.
Email depends on three DNS record types: MX records that tell sending servers where to deliver mail, SPF records in TXT entries that define which servers are authorised to send on your behalf, and DKIM records that provide cryptographic signatures for message verification. If any of these records are deleted, modified, or misconfigured, your outbound email gets rejected or flagged as spam by receiving servers. Add a PulseStack DNS monitor for your MX record and for each TXT record you rely on, with the value you expect, and you are alerted when one stops matching.
DNS hijacking occurs when an attacker modifies your DNS records to redirect traffic to servers they control. This can happen through compromised registrar accounts, exploited DNS management APIs, or BGP route hijacking that intercepts queries to your authoritative nameservers. PulseStack does not learn baselines for you. Instead, you give each DNS monitor the value you expect, such as your server's IP address or one of your nameservers. If your A record stops pointing at that IP, or your NS records no longer include your nameserver, the monitor alerts you on its next check.
DNS monitors run as often as every 5 minutes on any paid plan, so at that setting a change is picked up within about 5 minutes. DNS monitoring is included from the Starter plan. Each check looks the record up through public resolvers (Google and Cloudflare), so PulseStack sees a change once those resolvers do, which can take up to the record's TTL.
Yes. Each subdomain has its own independent DNS records and can be monitored separately. You can monitor www.example.com, api.example.com, mail.example.com, and staging.example.com as individual monitors. This is important because subdomains often point to different services, CDNs, or third-party platforms that can change independently. A forgotten subdomain pointing to a decommissioned service is a common subdomain takeover vulnerability.
DNS propagation is the process of DNS changes spreading across the global network of recursive resolvers. When you update a DNS record, the change appears on your authoritative nameserver immediately but cached copies at ISP resolvers worldwide continue serving the old record until their TTL expires. This means different users see different DNS responses during propagation. PulseStack looks records up through public resolvers (Google and Cloudflare), so it sees what most users see. It does not track propagation across resolvers worldwide.
Yes. PulseStack monitors DNS records regardless of which DNS provider hosts your zone. Cloudflare, AWS Route 53, Google Cloud DNS, Azure DNS, DigitalOcean DNS, Namecheap, GoDaddy, and any standards-compliant nameserver are supported. PulseStack looks records up through public DNS resolvers, so it works with any provider without requiring API access or account credentials.
Yes. The DNS lookup tool on this page is completely free with no account required. Enter any domain to see all A, AAAA, MX, NS, CNAME, TXT, and SOA records resolved via Google and Cloudflare DNS servers. For ongoing monitoring with alerts when a record stops matching the value you expect, DNS monitoring is included from the Starter plan, which you can try free for 14 days with no card needed.
Uptime monitoring checks whether your website or API responds to HTTP requests. DNS monitoring checks whether your domain's DNS records contain the correct values. You can have correct DNS records but a crashed web server, or a healthy web server but misconfigured DNS. Both failure modes produce the same symptom to users, but they require different diagnostic approaches. Running both DNS and HTTP monitoring gives you complete visibility into whether the problem is at the DNS layer or the application layer.
If your authoritative nameservers become unreachable, DNS resolvers worldwide will continue serving cached records until their TTL expires. After that, resolution fails entirely and your domain becomes unreachable for all services including web, email, and API. A PulseStack DNS monitor alerts you once the record can no longer be resolved. Because checks go through public resolvers, that happens when their cached copies expire, so if nameserver downtime is a real risk for you, consider a secondary DNS provider.
Add a DNS monitor, pin the expected value, and never be the last to know about a change again. Start free, no card required.