NS1 announced the release of DNS Insights, the industry's most comprehensive DNS observability solution. Available for NS1 Managed DNS and Dedicated DNS customers, DNS Insights unlocks improved reliability, real-time analysis, and cost control by collecting DNS and network metrics at the edge to empower networking professionals as they troubleshoot and optimize infrastructure at scale.  

DNS Insights arrives at a critical time for network observability. According to a recent survey of network professionals conducted by EMA and NS1, 43.3% of respondents reported that DNS logs have become more important to collect - but more than 20% of respondents note that their observability solutions suffer from a lack of insights, poor scalability, and high expenses. And as the number of devices and applications continues to increase, network professionals are under greater pressure to maintain and protect their environments.

"Modern networks need to provide flawless and secure connected interactions to billions of users and tens of billions of devices. To do this, it is essential that networking professionals have the ability to observe and dynamically adjust for constantly changing conditions," said Shannon Weyrick, vice president of research, NS1. "DNS Insights makes it easier for network teams to troubleshoot misconfigurations, detect DDoS attacks, and identify potential areas of optimization."

While other DNS providers only offer customers unprocessed DNS log information or surface-level analysis of DNS data, NS1's DNS Insights collects and analyzes more than 50 DNS and network metrics by inspecting every DNS interaction with NS1's platform. Because the solution is powered by technology from the open source Orb network observability project, it delivers results about real-time conditions as a curated data feed without the cost or time typically required to collect, store, and analyze huge amounts of data.

Customers also have OpenTelemetry support, allowing integrations to new and existing observability stacks. Users can isolate data from individual edge agents or look at high-level details about the most active domains, top error and response codes, top query types, and much more. NS1 also offers a secondary dashboard template for Grafana users that is specifically designed to highlight metrics to detect DDoS attacks.