DNS Monitoring Service for Infrastructure Domains

Document ID: ripe-429
Date: 17 April 2008
Updates: ripe-342

Since 2004, DNSMON has provided a comprehensive and independent overview of the quality of the service provided by infrastructure-level Domain Name System (DNS) servers. The background and history of the service can be found in "RIPE 342" [1], which this document obsoletes.

DNSMON is built on top of the Test Traffic Monitoring (TTM) network [2], and it uses the same probes for its measurements. Measurements are carried out by sending normal DNS queries to monitored servers at regular intervals. All results are available to the public.

The RIPE NCC's DNSMON measurements benefit the entire Internet community by providing an objective and impartial global overview of TLD-level DNS operations. As part of this service, we monitor some interesting infrastructure domains, including the root, free of charge.

If requested by the operators, we will also configure monitoring for the DNS servers of:

• Any TLD (ccTLD, gTLD etc)
• Any Tier-1 ENUM domain (for example, 1.3.e164.arpa)

Fees are charged for this service on a cost-recovery basis. Subscribers receive additional benefits, which may change from time to time. These are documented within the DNSMON operational service documents [3].

[1] ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-342.pdf
[2] http://www.ripe.net/ttm
[3] http://dnsmon.ripe.net/