Announcing Zone Vision, A New Tool for Inspecting DNS Zones

Analyzing DNS zones, using tools like dig, is something we do all the time here at DNSimple. Today we are launching a new service that wraps up some of the checks we perform in a nice and simple API and web interface. The service is called Zone Vision and is available at http://zone.vision. It also includes a JSON API to access the results for any domain at http://api.zone.vision.

Using Zone Vision is simple, just go to http://zone.vision/ and enter the domain you would like to analyze.

Press return and the analysis will be performed quickly, providing details about what records are found and test results for the health of the DNS zone.

On the left hand side you will see the types and counts for various records that were found. Below the overview you'll see the details for each of the record types found.

On the right hand side you will see a health measurement showing the results of a variety of tests that Zone Vision performs. It will verify that parent name servers provided delegation records to child name servers, that glue records were present if necessary, that the domain has an SOA, and more.

If you want to use the Zone Vision API, it's simple. Here is an example call with curl:

curl http://api.zone.vision/dnsimple.com

The result will be a JSON object with the domain name, apex indicator, parent name server results along with the source and response time, authoritative name servers results, resolver results, and a list of diagnostic tests that were run along with their results.

We hope you find this new tool useful. We will continue to improve the tool over time and we are already starting to integrate bits of the results into your DNSimple dashboard.

As always, feedback is welcome, just email us: support@dnsimple.com.

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Anthony Eden

I break things so Simone continues to have plenty to do. I occasionally have useful ideas, like building a domain and DNS provider that doesn't suck.