Good day all,

There have been a few instances where we've wanted to check our external DNS servers from various external networks, so we've utilized the existing looking glass tools provided by many of you. However, it's a very manual process, given that all LG's I've found say no automating/scripting. If we want to check from a couple dozen sites around the world, it's a lot of clicking and typing and collecting. If we wanted to create an tool that our NOC could use to verify our services, we would need something we could script. Ideally, we'd be able to run this constantly to do health checks on our services, but one step at a time.

I've been googling, but so far I'm unable to find any larger scale projects/toolsets that we could use to simplify this process. Is anyone aware of something that would allow for me to submit a "job" to some sort of distributed service (I care about DNS, but others may care about traceroutes, pings, bgp information, etc), that will then run run the "job" and give me back an answer?

Similarly, but perhaps differently, those of you who may run large anycast DNS services, how do you gather "external" stats about routing, response time, availability, and so on? It seems like this sort of thing would be a fairly common requirement (lets see how my network looks to those outside of it) but everything I can find is very manual at this point.

This looks like a somewhat promising option, however I don't think I could get buy-in to run a node in our network, so it's not on the table for now: https://ring.nlnog.net/

This same functionality would likely be very helpful internal to large networks as well.

I would love to know if I'm missing something obvious, or pieces of something obvious we could work with. Failing something already existing, I'd value any information people care to share about how they do this now, either on or off list. I can summarize any findings if the community is interested.

The usual technique is to buy a few cheap virtual private servers at points of interest around the net and then do whatever you please. The problem is that your network will have a different monitoring system than our network, so if you want something that integrates cleanly with your Nagios based system, it'll be different than what integrates cleanly with our WhatsUp system. So it's usually easier to just go with some cheap virtual private servers. If you're clever, you might see if you can exchange services with a few other small networks. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.

Todd Snyder(todd@borked.ca)@Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 12:08:06PM -0400:

Good day all,

There have been a few instances where we've wanted to check our external DNS servers from various external networks, so we've utilized the existing looking glass tools provided by many of you. However, it's a very manual process, given that all LG's I've found say no automating/scripting. If we want to check from a couple dozen sites around the world, it's a lot of clicking and typing and collecting. If we wanted to create an tool that our NOC could use to verify our services, we would need something we could script. Ideally, we'd be able to run this constantly to do health checks on our services, but one step at a time.

To suggest a service that I have no relation to (other than being a happy customer), have you looked at Pingdom [http://www.pingdom.com/] ? I'm not using the DNS check type, but I have a dozen or so HTTP checks there. Their system is super simple, no frills, and is priced like it :) It looks like you can list a domain to test, a server to check and what result you expect. They run checks from a bunch of different places (40 servers, seemingly half in the US, right now). Pricing at the low scale is $6/check/year, which is pretty compelling even against running some VPSes if you aren't checking too many sites. -- Bill Weiss