Every day, somewhere north of 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data are generated by all manner of things that generate data. Unsurprisingly, about 90% of that data is unstructured, meaning it just exists and doesn’t serve a higher purpose than just being. While these numbers, at a macro scale, are not necessarily indicative of the infrastructure that runs your business’ online presence, the ratio may not be far off.
Many organizations, whether for security or auditing purposes, simply file this information away in a logging solution for the day it might be needed for something. Imagine for a moment that you could take the information that is generated in your stack and do something more intriguing with it.
Harnessing The Power Of Metadata
One of the unique features of the NS1 platform is the ability to take data that is important to you, and more importantly your customers and users, and make informed traffic steering decisions based on that. Traditionally, Managed DNS providers have only been able to provide simple failover or rudimentary geographic load balancing based on whether an endpoint was reporting up or down from their own monitoring solution. While this solution has proven to be solid over the years, it provides a rather narrow context of what’s really going on.
For instance, a basic failover configuration may only see if a server responds at all; sure, the server is up and running but the application may not be. In this case, a 3rd party application monitoring solution may be in place, but that data is only sent to the company’s DevOps team for further inspection and intervention.
Ideally, this configuration would leverage both sets of data - one from the Managed DNS provider that monitors ports 80 and 443 to ensure that the endpoint responds when an HTTP/S connection is made, and another from the APM solution that is looking at key metrics about the application to corroborate the findings of the basic HTTP/S check. With two sets of data at hand, the likelihood of a false positive around the state of that service is greatly reduced.
Taking Command Of Your Infrastructure
With the ability to steer DNS queries on many inputs, the NS1 platform becomes a sort of control panel for your entire online presence. By using data that you’re already sourcing from either open source solutions or tools that you’ve paid to have watch your systems, precision control over traffic is yours in full measure. Whether you choose to manually control certain attributes of your infrastructure using the NS1 portal, or automate everything in the stack with our flexible REST API, the ability to get the most out of your investment across the board comes standard with every level of NS1’s Managed DNS.
For more information on our Filter Chain technology, check out our Knowledge Base.