Troubleshoot DNS Issues When “Your Site Could Not Be Reached”

We’ve all received this error message, “This site can’t be reached.” It’s one of the most common error messages and it can appear for any number of reasons, including issues with DNS, CDNs, and BGP. This week’s Tip Tuesday video looks at how Catchpoint can help you identify why your site is having this problem. We walk through one real-world example where Catchpoint’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solution helps identify and troubleshoot the reachability issue. This is just one example of how we can help you troubleshoot DNS issues, CDN outages, and BGP leaks to help you get your site reachable as soon as possible.

Troubleshoot DNS Issues

This video focuses on a time when DNS is causing the reachability issue. In this example, synthetic tests running around the globe show that one site is having a reachability issue, whereas other sites are not. Catchpoint’s dashboards make it easy to determine that it’s DNS causing the problem. DNS plays a critical role in your web application, so monitoring your DNS infrastructure is equally critical. Latency at any stage in the DNS resolution process can quickly stack up and impact user experience.

Catchpoint has two different types of DNS tests:

• DNS Direct – This test directly queries the name servers to offer availability data and ensure the accuracy of responses.
• DNS Experience – This test runs recursive queries to resolve DNS to measure latency, availability, and performance of the different DNS servers in the pathway.

Both tests can help you identify what went wrong and why, as well as provide information you can quickly share with your network or application teams. This data can also be used to benchmark third-party DNS providers and CDN providers, and track your SLAs.

Watch a Video Demo to See Catchpoint Drill Down Into the DNS Issue

We’ve recorded a brief video to demonstrate how Catchpoint can help you understand what may be behind the lack of reachability to your website. See how you can use the portal’s node map to view all your synthetic tests running worldwide, and quickly determine where the problem lies. When you have identified this, you can drill down further using Catchpoint’s Smartboard and handy visualizations to pinpoint exactly what is going on, where.

This video shows how Catchpoint can help you:

• Identify what is causing the outage using the node map
• Drill down to identify where outages are occurring worldwide
• Prioritize areas of focus
• Avoid loss of time contacting the wrong teams
• Reduce MTTR