Web Troubleshooting: How to find DNS IP and IP Location

Where is DNS resolving? Where is IP located?

Troubleshooting is fun if you are equipped with the right tools and procedures. While doing web application troubleshooting (especially when it’s internet-facing), one of the challenging tasks is to find URL IP, locations & ISP.

This becomes very crucial when you are having CDN (dynamic IP) or hosted applications at vendor sites with multiple nating & floating IPs.

There are many ways to find this information but getting it quickly and accurately makes you smarter.

In this article, I will share online tools to help in finding 1) DNS IP addresses 2) IP locations.

So first…

Find out where is DNS resolving to

Let’s take a scenario that you found some URL, which is not connecting from your application and you need to find out URL’s IP address. If it’s an internal URL then you can easily do nslookup and find the IP address.

Ex: nslookup internalurl.intra

However, if it’s an external URL and can’t do nslookup because your network administrator blocks it then you got to use online tools to find out.

Here are two DNS record lookup tools, which you can use to find out A record of DNS.

1. DNS Watch

It’s my first choice to use DNSWatch to find out resolving IP & NS records. You can also use this tool to find out AAA, MX, NS, SOA, and TXT records. It’s very simple to use – access the following URL and enter the URL you wish to find out and click on Resolve.

And you can see the results, it resolves to two name servers & two IP addresses.

2. DNS Lookup

A good alternative would be Geekflare’s DNS Lookup tool.

So now, you know how to perform DNS record lookup to find out its resolving IP details.

Now the second one,

Find out IP location, ISP

This scenario could be very wide, some of the following.

• Your application is accelerated with CDN like AKAMAI, etc. which resolves based on location and you need to find out a particular IP location
• You see unusual requests pattern in your application and would like to know the IP location and its owner
• You would like to owner of a particular IP address

There are plenty of tools, which can help you with this, however, here are two online tools, which I use and found very useful.

1. IP Location

It’s my first choice to use IP location to find out IP location and its ownership. To use, access the following URL >> enter an IP address and click on Query

As a result, you can see Geolocation data from IP2Location, IPLigence, IP Address Labs, DB-IP, IPINFO.IO, MaxMind. You see in one query you get results from various geolocation databases. Isn’t it cool to get this information within second and that’s free!

2. IP Location Lookup

Geekflare’s IP Location Lookup lets you know quickly find out country, city, region, and ISP of IP.

I hope now you know how to find out DNS records lookup and IP geolocation details. This can be very handy if in supporting Internet-facing applications.