DNSMON to Become Production Level Service from March 2005
[22 February 2005]

The RIPE NCC DNS Monitoring Service (DNSMON) provides a comprehensive, objective and up-to-date overview of the quality of the service offered by high-level Domain Name System (DNS) servers. It is an active measurement service. It uses our Test Traffic Measurements (TTM) network to provide an up-to-date service overview of certain DNS root and Top-Level Domain (TLD) name servers. An important feature is the ability to view historical data. This allows the rapid analysis of both past and present DNS issues.

The service is available through its own website at:

http://dnsmon.ripe.net

Development of the service started in 2003. During the development phase, we offered the service free of charge to the entire Internet community. This will change on 1 March 2005. On this day, the service will become a regular production service and the following will change:

• The RIPE NCC will start to charge a service fee to the administrators of the TLDs using DNSMON. This is a request from the RIPE NCC membership, in order to recover the costs of offering the service.
• We will continue to offer the service free of charge to users of the TTM service.
• If you are a member of the public using the data on the DNSMON website you need take no action.

DNSMON measures DNS performance between sites that take part in the TTM service and those where DNS servers are installed. If you are a network operator interested in the performance between your site and the DNS servers, you should consider installing a test box at your site.

You can find out more about this at:

http://www.ripe.net/ttm

In recent months, several users suggested additional features for this service. We have noted all suggestions. As soon as we have finished setting up contracts for this service, we will look at the suggestions and come up with a possible implementation scheme. We will post this on the DNSMON Mailing List.

If you have any questions, please contact us.