About the IBM NS1 Connect® platform
The IBM® NS1 Connect® platform is a central location to manage your DNS resources across multiple NS1 networks and optimize traffic distribution among your application or service endpoints. It provides powerful tools like the Filter Chain, allowing you to select from a variety of traffic steering filters to customize traffic steering behavior based on your unique requirements or business objectives. Additionally, the platform provides valuable data sets and, for DNS Insights™ customers, access to detailed reports for deeper insight into network behavior, trends, and anomalies.
All IBM NS1 Connect® accounts can publish zones to the Managed DNS network and leverage basic traffic steering configuration tools to improve application delivery and network performance. Paid plans offer increased queries and records and add-on features. Refer to the IBM NS1 Connect product page for details.
You can think of the platform as having five key components, each representing a general category to group similar features and functionality.
- Resource management
- DNS zones, records, and answers are the foundation of your network as they contain critical information so that your audiences (as in, people or clients requesting information about your domains) can access your websites or applications. Resource management refers to creating and configuring zones and records on the NS1 platform.
- Traffic steering
- The NS1 platform delivers next-generation traffic steering technology you can use to distribute DNS traffic intelligently across your network. The NS1 Filter Chain allows you to construct a custom policy by selecting a variety of traffic steering filters—each applying a unique processing method to determine the best possible endpoint to direct each request. Organizations with more complex global networks or more challenging requirements may leverage NS1's advanced traffic steering filters which use real user monitoring (RUM) data to inform traffic steering decisions in real-time.
- Monitoring
- The most common traffic steering rules include avoiding unavailable, overloaded, or under-performing endpoints. You can configure a basic NS1 monitor to track the up/down status of an endpoint. Alternatively, you can use one of the supporting monitoring integrations to pull data collected by third-party monitors to the NS1 platform to inform traffic steering. If included in your NS1 plan, you can configure RUM-based (Pulsar) applications and jobs to pull real-time availability and performance metrics from shared or private data sources back to the NS1 platform to optimize load balancing across complex, global networks.
- Observability
- All NS1 customers have access to basic DNS reports like queries per second (QPS) and global
traffic distribution. You can use these reports to detect sudden drops or upticks in DNS traffic,
compare domains across networks, and more. If available on your account, NS1 DNS Insights™ uses
lightweight, actionable data feeds to provide a granular view of performance, trends, and
anomalies—giving you the insight necessary to improve system performance and security while reducing
operational costs. Finally, those leveraging NS1’s RUM (Pulsar) traffic steering solution can access
a variety of data sets and reports containing real-time performance and availability data collected
from active application users.Related tasks:
- Account management
- Beyond DNS management, account administrators can manage users, teams, and API keys to ensure appropriate access levels based on the user role or function of the API key. They can also view and modify billing-related settings, account activity, security settings, and all other tasks related to managing your NS1 account.