DNS Check Integration Guide

DNS Check enables you to easily monitor, share and troubleshoot DNS records. You can import your zone file and have DNS Check monitor the records in it, or specify individual records that you would like monitored. A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SRV and TXT records are supported.

In this guide we will integrate a DNS Check account’s alerts with PagerDuty! This can be done with both free and paid DNS Check accounts.

In DNS Check

1. Login to DNS Check.
2. Click the User icon in the top-right corner, then click Notification Options.
   
3. Click the green “Alert with PagerDuty” button. This will direct you to an authorization page on PagerDuty. Alternatively, you can click the Manually configure PagerDuty checkbox if you prefer to enter a PagerDuty API key directly.
   
4. Enter your PagerDuty login email address and password, then click Authorize Integration.
   
5. Choose a name and escalation policy for the DNS Check service, then click Finish Integration.
   
6. PagerDuty will direct you back to DNS Check’s website. If the integration process was completed, then there will be a message in a green box as shown below indicating that. Otherwise, a red box will be displayed, indicating why the integration process was not completed.
   
7. Notice that in the above screenshot, the Enable PagerDuty notifications field has been toggled to On. This field can be toggled off and on to disable and re-enable PagerDuty notifications at any time.

Test DNS Check/ Pagerduty Integration

Now that DNS Check and PagerDuty are integrated, you can trigger a test page.

1. Click the DNS Checks tab in the top navigation bar of DNS Check’s website.
   
2. Click the Add DNS record group button.
   
3. Give the DNS Record Group a name, then click Save. For the purposes of this test, the remaining fields can be left at their default values, but if you’d like more information, the Share DNS Records document describes them in detail.
   
4. Click on the DNS Record Group that you just created:
   
5. Click the Add DNS record button, then select A record from the drop up menu.
   
6. Specify that the nyc1.dnscheck.co A record should resolve to the 192.168.0.1 IP address, then click Save.
   
7. DNS Check will automatically test the DNS record, and notify PagerDuty of the failure within a few seconds. Here is an example:
    Verify that PagerDuty pages you via the escalation policy that you selected earlier.
8. Now that a PagerDuty incident has been triggered, let’s fix the problem that triggered it. Begin by clicking the Edit button for the DNS record that you just created.
   
9. Enter the correct IP address (104.131.72.189), then click Save.
   DNS Check will automatically re-test the DNS record as soon as you click the Save button. If the test passes, PagerDuty will be notified within a few seconds, and resolve the incident.