The availability, performance and security of your DNS infrastructure is essential to offering a good digital experience to your users—yet DNS is an often overlooked aspect of architecting digital offerings. Managed DNS provider NS1 joins ThousandEyes to provide insight into modernizing your DNS platform for improved digital experience. We'll cover ThousandEyes performance findings on managed DNS providers, techniques to improve performance for your users, and monitoring DNS infrastructure for availability and performance.

2. 2Confidential ©2019 ThousandEyes + NS1. All Rights Reserved.
Modernize, Secure, and Monitor Your DNS
Modernizing Your DNS Platform
with NS1 and ThousandEyes
Keeping Your DNS Secure
with NS1 and ThousandEyes
Integrating Monitoring into Your DNS
Platform with NS1 and ThousandEyes
https://www.thousandeyes.com/webinars
March 26, 2019
09:00 – 10:00 AM PDT
May 28, 2019
09:00 – 10:00 AM PDT
January 30, 2019
09:00 – 10:00 AM PDT

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Angelique Medina
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
@bitprints
Jonathan Lewis
VP, Product Marketing
@NS1
Joining Us Today…
Moderator: Ameet Naik, Technical Marketing Manager, ThousandEyes

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NS1 Provides Next Generation DNS For How
Today’s Applications Are Deployed and Delivered

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ThousandEyes Provides Visibility into Performance
from Every User to Every Application Over Any
Network
Routing
User App
End-to-End Performance Data
User
Experience
App
Performance
Routing
Topology
Network
Topology
Enterprise, Endpoint and Cloud Agents
Network
Connectivity
Device
Performance
20/25
top SaaS
companies
5/6
top US
banks
65+
Fortune 500
companies
8/10
top global
software companies

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• DNS and digital experience
• What’s driving the need for
modernization?
• Modern DNS capabilities
• Modern DNS visibility
• Wrap up and Q&A
Agenda

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DNS is Critical to Digital Experience

8. CIOs expect 37% of
their revenues to be
attributed to digital
sales by 2020.
“
”

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Digital Experience Journey

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Complex Interplay of Infrastructures
Recursive resolvers
act as “agents of
discovery”
Root Servers and
Top-level Domains
provide hierarchical
infrastructure
Authoritative DNS
Servers store the
pointers to your
Internet presence
Generic Internet Infrastructure Enterprise InfluencedUser Influenced

11. Least Understood Aspect of Digital Experience
Widespread
DNS Hijackings
68% of top SaaS
and Fortune 50
Lack DNS Resilience

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What’s Driving the Need for Modernization?

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The Value of 1 Second
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/page-load-time-conversion-rates
7% More Revenue
11% More Page Views
7% More Conversions

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Request Counts to Load a Page
https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks.pdf

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Performance and User Behavior
https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks.pdf

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Latency Kills Performance
Source: https://hpbn.co/primer-on-web-performance/#latency-as-a-performance-bottleneck
80ms latency

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Why Latency Matters?
150 ms
4RTT = 700ms
Confidential ©2019 ThousandEyes + NS1. All Rights Reserved.

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Where Does the Time Go?

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Where is the Impact on Performance?
small
big
medium
big
small

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Modern DNS Platform

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Choose a DNS Provider with Fast and Consistent Resolution Times

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Use DNS Traffic Management to Minimize Latency
✓ Geo Routing to Closest POP
✓ Sticky Routing to Increase Cache
Hit Ratios
✓ RUM Steering to Select Lowest
Latency Path

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Use Intelligent DNS Global Load Balancing
✓ Active Failover
✓ Load Shedding

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Performance Test Results
Without DNS Traffic Management With DNS Traffic Management Performance Boost
Average RTT 477ms 355ms 25%
95 percentile RTT 1056ms 653ms 38%

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Tuning Parameters
• Active Failover: Choosing the monitoring frequency
• DNS TTL: How fast records age out of the resolver cache
• Considerations:
– How fast do you want the system to react to changes?
– How fast can the system react to changes

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Time to Live (TTL) Value
• Geo routed records don’t need a short TTL (geo-location is a static attribute)
• Failover records do need a short TTL
• Short TTLs will increase queries from resolvers to the authoritative servers
(some performance hit)
• Resolvers do not all respect the TTLs
• Rule of thumb—20 second monitoring frequency for failover, 30 second TTL on
the failover record.
• Theoretically, 50% of users will be rerouted within 25 seconds of an event,
100% within 1 minute.
• In practice, there is a long tail—but most users are successfully rerouted

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A Canonical DNS Traffic Management Example
DNS
Query
Shed Load
Sticky
Shuffle
Optimal
DNS
Answer
Real Time
ADC
Metrics
Send
returning
users to
same POP
Up/Down
Filter
Real-time
Server
Monitors
Geo
Proximity
Industry
leading
Geo db

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Modern DNS Visibility

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Three Pillars of Modern DNS Visibility
DNS
Performance
DNS
Integrity
Real-time App
Performance
Optimization
Keep DNS resolution
time low
Ensure the right
response is served up
by YOU
Automate operational
feedback to improve
app delivery

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Aspects of DNS Performance
Core Internet Infrastructure
(roots, TLDs)
Recursive resolvers
(public, ISP, private)
3rd Party Web/App componentsAuthoritative Nameservers
You Don’t Control
You Control Authoritative Nameservers 3rd Party Web/App components

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Broad global coverage
What Does Good Visibility Look Like?
• Geographic representation
of users• BGP route visualization
and alerting
• DNS server
• Response time
• L3 path visualization
• Performance metrics:
packet loss, latency, jitter
• REST API for integration
with ops and planning tools
• Share events with
stakeholders
App-layer
visibility
Network-layer visibility
Internet routing visibility
Easily consume, share,
and integrate datasets

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DNS Performance Visibility Use Cases
• Plan, baseline, set goals
• Internal or managed DNS?
• Which managed provider(s)?
• Issue identification and troubleshooting
• Maintain performance baselines
• Share data with external providers
PLANNING OPERATIONS

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Compare Provider Performance
other provider
NS1
PLANNING

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Identify Root Cause of Issues
Users unable
to reach
nameserver
ISP Dropping
Packets
Nameserver
OPERATIONS

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Operations Processes Change in the Cloud
IT Assets You Don’t Control
Evidence Escalate?
IT Assets You Control
?Find Fix

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Don’t Forget 3rd Party DNS

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Summary

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Performance Optimization Best Practices
Fast DNS Resolution in all Markets
Flexible and Intelligent Traffic Management
Redundant DNS Infrastructure
Real User Measurements
Traffic Load Management

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Performance Visibility Best Practices
Measure performance to make provider decisions
Monitor network, routing and app-layer for quick remediation
Use interactive sharelinks to share with external providers
Stay aware of DNS load from external dependencies
Understand performance impact of DNS infrastructures
outside your control

40. • Industry’s most comprehensive
study of DNS infrastructures
• Top three managed providers:
NS1, Cloudflare and Dyn
• Regional variations that can
impact application delivery
https://www.thousandeyes.com/resources/
2018-global-dns-performance-benchmark-report