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  1. News

Introducing DNS Health Checks: Available Now

Published September 7, 2023 in DNS Product Update

Gcore’s DNS Health Checks feature is now officially available!

What Is DNS Health Checks?

DNS Health Checks is a tool that ensures that your website or application is continuously available to users, even when some servers are down. By continuously monitoring your servers’ availability, Health Checks immediately redirects traffic from a non-working server to a functioning one. This feature minimizes downtime—crucial for businesses where loss of availability means loss of customers.

Benefits of DNS Health Checks

With DNS Health Checks, you can:

  • Ensure high availability: DNS Health Checks redirects traffic to active servers in case of server downtime or its bandwidth congestion, ensuring your resource is always available for all users.
  • Customize request settings: You can adjust the protocol to test server availability, request frequency, timeout, and other request settings, such as a plain text command for TCP/UDP or request method for HTTP protocol in the control panel, tailoring DNS Health Checks to your unique needs and preferences.
  • Use Geo Balancer: DNS Health Checks works with round-robin load balancing by default but also allows you to enable geobalancing during configuration. The Gcore Geo Balancer feature facilitates ultimate optimization based on user location, providing control over where your traffic is routed, and ensuring that users are connected to the geographically closest or most suitable server.

How Does DNS Health Checks Work?

There are six steps to DNS Health Checks behind the scenes:

  1. Monitoring: DNS Health Checks sends regular requests to your servers to check their availability. If your web servers send responses to DNS Health Checks within the designated time frame, the feature will mark them as available.
  2. Assessment: Based on server responses (or lack thereof) Health Checks notify the DNS hosting if a web server is unavailable: “Stop responding with the … IP”.
  3. Failover: The DNS hosting excludes the A record of the unavailable server from responses. All requests destined for this server are directed to other available servers.
  4. DNS Resolver update: DNS Resolver will receive and pass only live servers’ IP addresses to the user.
  5. Application user request: Application users will send requests to live servers only.
  6. Continued monitoring and restoration: DNS Health Checks keeps sending requests to web servers. When the web server becomes available and responds, the feature will send the appropriate update to the DNS server. After that, the web server will go back online for end users again.

Note: If no web servers respond, all their A records will be added to the DNS response, respecting other filters.

How Gcore DNS Health Checks works

This system maintains the uptime of websites and online services: By continually monitoring server availability and dynamically rerouting traffic in the event of a failure, Health Checks ensures that users can always reach a functioning server. This stops noticeable downtime, which could lead to customer frustration and loss of revenue.

How to Set Up DNS Health Checks

Setting up Health Checks is quick and easy: Open the DNS interface, navigate to the desired DNS zone, and enable “Advanced interface mode.” Then, enable the Health Checks feature, select the protocol type, configure the check settings, and establish the backup IP addresses and logic for request distribution. Save your changes, and you’re good to go!

For detailed instructions, refer to our Product Documentation.

Get Started Now

Whether you own an online store operating across multiple continents, a popular gaming server, or any other digital service where constant availability is crucial, our DNS Health Checks is a game-changer. We’ve ensured you can get started quickly and easily to reap the benefits. We also invite you to take a deep dive into Health Check configurations.

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