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Domain Monitoring · All Plans
A domain fails in more ways than "the site is down." Records drift, registrations lapse, certificates expire on one server out of four, and look-alikes appear overnight. DNS Spy monitors all of it — every domain, every nameserver, every layer — and alerts you before users notice.
Free scan, no signup · 7-day trial · Flat monthly pricing
Domain monitoring — or domain name monitoring — is the continuous observation of everything that keeps a domain working and trustworthy: the DNS records that route its traffic, the registration and expiry dates in WHOIS, the SSL certificates that secure it, and the health of the nameservers that answer for it. It also has a second meaning that matters just as much: watching for other people's domains that imitate yours.
Most tools pick one slice. Uptime monitors watch HTTP. Registrars nag about expiration. Brand-protection suites watch look-alikes. DNS Spy is a domain monitoring service that covers the whole surface in one place — because in practice, the incident you get is never the one you happened to have a tool for.
Each layer fails differently — and each is watched continuously, with alerts on every state change.
Every record, checked against every authoritative nameserver — not a single resolver. Change detection with full version history, so you know what changed, when, and on which nameserver. Tampering, botched migrations, and silent drift all surface immediately.
Explore DNS record monitoring →Registration expiry, registrar transfers, nameserver delegation changes, and status-code flips (like the clientHold that takes a domain offline) — tracked from the registry, with alerts long before an expiration becomes an outage.
Explore WHOIS monitoring →Certificates discovered automatically through your DNS records, on every IP endpoint. Tiered expiry alerts at 90, 30, and 7 days plus six security checks for weak keys, hostname mismatches, and deprecated protocols.
Explore SSL monitoring →A continuous DNS audit: 40+ automated checks covering DNSSEC, email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), dangling CNAMEs, nameserver health, and more — scored into a letter grade per domain, alerted on every state change.
Explore the Security Center →Domain monitoring isn't only about your domains — it's about the ones pretending to be yours. Phishing Sentinel discovers typosquatting and homograph registrations targeting your brand and scores each threat by its live infrastructure.
Explore brand protection →Every one of these happens to real teams, and none of them trigger an uptime alert until the damage is done.
The renewal notice went to a former employee's inbox. The domain lapsed, email died, and a drop-catcher was waiting. Expiration tracking with escalating alerts makes this failure mode impossible to miss.
An MX record pointed somewhere new and email quietly flowed through an attacker's server. Nobody on the team made the change. Per-nameserver record monitoring catches hijacks and unauthorized edits the moment they answer differently.
Four servers behind a load balancer; the renewal reached three of them. One in four requests failed for a week before anyone correlated the reports. Multi-endpoint SSL discovery checks every IP, not just the first.
A domain one character off from yours gained mail servers and a fresh certificate on a Tuesday. The phishing campaign against your customers started Thursday. Look-alike monitoring buys you the days in between.
Uptime tools ask one question — does the site respond? — and go through public resolvers to ask it. They miss everything upstream: the record that changed but still resolves, the nameserver that's serving stale data, the WHOIS status flip, the certificate expiring next week on one server in the pool. Domain monitoring watches the layer uptime monitoring stands on.
Your registrar will remind you about expiration — for the domains registered with them, if the notification email is current. A domain monitoring service is registrar-independent: every domain in one place regardless of where it's registered or hosted, with DNS, SSL, and security monitoring the registrar never offers.
The manual system works until the person maintaining it changes roles, a domain gets added without a row, or a change happens between quarterly reviews. Monitoring replaces institutional memory with automation: complete coverage via provider sync, alerts on state changes, and history you can audit.
Monitoring is only as good as its record list. DNS Spy builds yours three ways: autodiscovery probes hundreds of common hostnames, zone transfers pull everything where AXFR is allowed, and Provider Sync connects directly to Cloudflare, Route 53, DNSimple, DigitalOcean, Bunny, Linode, or Vultr with a read-only token — importing every record and keeping the list synced as your zones change.
The free scan checks your records on every authoritative nameserver, pulls your certificates, runs 40+ security checks, and grades the result — in about a minute, no signup required.
Run the Free ScanDomain monitoring is the continuous observation of everything that keeps a domain working and trustworthy: its DNS records, its registration status and expiry date (WHOIS), its SSL certificates, its nameserver health, and — for brand protection — the registration of look-alike domains that imitate it. A domain monitoring service watches all of these automatically and alerts you when something changes or is about to break.
DNS Spy's domain monitoring service includes DNS record change detection verified against every authoritative nameserver, WHOIS lifecycle tracking with expiration alerts, automatic SSL certificate discovery with tiered expiry warnings, 40+ automated security checks with per-domain scoring, and optional look-alike domain detection for brand protection. Alerts are delivered by email, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, or webhooks.
The terms are used interchangeably. Both refer to watching a domain name's health and lifecycle — its DNS, registration, expiry, and certificates. Some vendors use "domain name monitoring" specifically for watching new registrations of names similar to yours (brand protection); DNS Spy covers that too, through Phishing Sentinel.
No — DNS Spy monitors domains you own or manage (and look-alikes targeting them), not the availability of domains you'd like to acquire. For registration availability and backorders, use a registrar or drop-catching service. If you want to watch a domain you own for unauthorized changes, expiry risk, or hijacking, that is exactly what DNS Spy does.
DNS Spy plans start with a Personal plan for up to 10 domains — DNS record monitoring, WHOIS and expiration tracking, SSL discovery, and email alerts included. The Enterprise plan adds the full Security Center, look-alike domain detection, team features, and API access. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial with full Enterprise access, no credit card required.
Yes — run a free DNS scan. It fetches your records from every authoritative nameserver, pulls your SSL certificates, runs the full security check suite, and grades the domain. No signup required. It's a one-time snapshot of what DNS Spy then monitors continuously.
DNS, WHOIS, SSL, security, and look-alikes — one domain monitoring service, flat monthly pricing, alerts where your team already works. Free for 7 days.
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