At one point, I had to make and maintain my own DNS zone text file, knowing only a little. Today, cheap providers give me various Web forms interfaces, but that doesn't mean it will always "just work", so knowing a little can still help.
I still had to break out `dig` the other day, when a DNS provider started answering records days past TTL, breaking email and Web.
To know when if/when that happened again, I looked around for a monitoring service, but didn't quickly find one that did what I wanted (and was overwhelmed by SEO, and very aggressive robo-sales emails from one of them), so I wrote a script that essentially runs `dig` and `diff`: https://www.neilvandyke.org/check-my-dns/
The monitoring script discovered one of a provider's DNS servers had ongoing problems, so I sent them a monitoring report, saying I wasn't a DNS expert, but perhaps, if there's a problem, the report would be helpful to their DNS experts. This seemed to immediately get past any "have you tried rebooting Windows" front-line flowchart response that I wouldn't have been surprised to hear, and they said they're working on it.
I still had to break out `dig` the other day, when a DNS provider started answering records days past TTL, breaking email and Web.
To know when if/when that happened again, I looked around for a monitoring service, but didn't quickly find one that did what I wanted (and was overwhelmed by SEO, and very aggressive robo-sales emails from one of them), so I wrote a script that essentially runs `dig` and `diff`: https://www.neilvandyke.org/check-my-dns/
The monitoring script discovered one of a provider's DNS servers had ongoing problems, so I sent them a monitoring report, saying I wasn't a DNS expert, but perhaps, if there's a problem, the report would be helpful to their DNS experts. This seemed to immediately get past any "have you tried rebooting Windows" front-line flowchart response that I wouldn't have been surprised to hear, and they said they're working on it.