Your SIEM is where security signals go to be correlated. Endpoint telemetry, authentication events, network flows, cloud audit logs, all of it lands in Splunk, Elastic, or Microsoft Sentinel so analysts can see the whole picture instead of a dozen disconnected dashboards. Yet in most organizations, one signal is conspicuously missing from that picture: DNS.
That absence matters more than it first appears. A DNS record changing without authorization, a subdomain suddenly becoming takeover vulnerable, or a domain's email authentication silently breaking are all security events. Sitting alone in a separate tool, each is an isolated alert somebody may or may not act on. Correlated inside your SIEM alongside your other telemetry, the same event becomes part of an investigable timeline.
This guide covers why DNS belongs in your SIEM, what the integration patterns actually look like, and how to think about the work involved, including an honest account of what DNS Assistant provides and what you build yourself.
Why DNS Signals Belong in Your SIEM
Three reasons make the case, and they compound.
Correlation is where the value is. A DNS record change on its own is a data point. A DNS record change that occurs twenty minutes after an unusual login to your DNS provider account, from an IP your identity provider also flagged, is an incident. Your SIEM is the only place that correlation can happen, because it is the only system holding both signals. DNS alerts routed anywhere else cannot participate in that analysis.
Analysts work in one place. Security teams already live in the SIEM. Alerts that arrive somewhere else, a separate console, a dedicated email inbox, a Slack channel nobody has assigned, get triaged inconsistently or missed entirely. Routing DNS events into the existing workflow means they are handled with the same rigor as everything else.
Retention and evidence. SIEMs are built for long-term retention, search, and reporting. DNS change history sitting in your SIEM becomes searchable during an investigation months later, and usable as evidence during an audit. This matters increasingly as frameworks move toward expecting continuous evidence of control, which we cover in our guide to building a continuous DNS compliance program.
What DNS Events Are Worth Sending
Not every DNS signal deserves SIEM ingestion. Sending everything creates noise and cost. The events that earn their place are the ones with genuine security meaning:
- Record changes, particularly to A, MX, NS, TXT, and CNAME records. An unexpected change to any of these can indicate compromise or misconfiguration with real consequences.
- Dangling record detection, when a record becomes vulnerable to subdomain takeover. This is high-severity and time-sensitive.
- New subdomain discovery, since an unexpected subdomain appearing may signal shadow IT or something worse.
- Email authentication failures or drift in SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configuration.
- DNSSEC validation failures and approaching signature expiry.
- WHOIS and registration changes, especially registrar or nameserver changes, which can indicate a hijacking attempt.
- Domain expiration warnings, which are operational rather than adversarial but cause severe outages.
A reasonable starting posture is to ingest the high-severity categories (record changes, dangling detection, WHOIS changes, DNSSEC failures) and add the rest once you have tuned your alerting.
The Two Integration Patterns
Almost every SIEM integration follows one of two patterns, and understanding the difference helps you pick the right one for your environment.
Push: Webhooks
In a push model, the monitoring platform sends an event to your endpoint the moment it occurs. You configure a webhook URL, and each alert arrives as an HTTP request carrying the event data.
The advantage is latency. Events reach your SIEM within seconds of detection, which matters for high severity items like a newly dangling record. The tradeoff is that you need an endpoint capable of receiving them: an HTTP collector in your SIEM, a log forwarding service, or a small intermediary function that accepts the webhook and forwards it in the format your SIEM expects. Splunk's HTTP Event Collector, Elastic's ingest endpoints, and Sentinel's data collection endpoints all serve this role.
Pull: API Polling
In a pull model, your SIEM or a scheduled job periodically queries the monitoring platform's API and ingests whatever is new since the last run.
The advantage is control and resilience. You decide the cadence, you can backfill historical data, and a brief outage on either side does not lose events, the next poll catches up. The tradeoff is latency, since events arrive on your polling interval rather than instantly.
Which to Use
Most mature setups use both. Webhooks carry the high severity, time sensitive alerts where minutes matter. Scheduled API pulls handle bulk ingestion, backfill, and reconciliation, ensuring nothing was missed if a webhook delivery failed. If you are starting with one, choose based on your priority: webhooks for speed, API polling for completeness and simpler operational handling.
Practical Considerations Before You Build
A few things worth deciding up front, because retrofitting them is painful.
Normalization. Your SIEM likely uses a common schema (Elastic Common Schema, Splunk's Common Information Model, or Sentinel's table structures). Deciding early how DNS events map into your schema makes them correlatable with your other data rather than an isolated island of differently-shaped records.
Severity mapping. Not all DNS events warrant the same response. Map them to your existing severity levels so a dangling record on a production subdomain pages someone, while a low priority informational change simply logs.
Volume and cost. Most SIEMs price on ingestion volume. DNS monitoring generates far less data than endpoint or network telemetry, but filter to security-relevant events rather than ingesting everything, both for cost and for signal quality.
Detection rules. Ingestion alone accomplishes little. The value comes from the correlation rules you write on top: DNS change plus provider-account login, dangling record on an externally-facing subdomain, nameserver change without a corresponding change ticket. Plan to write a handful of rules, not just a pipeline.
How DNS Assistant Integrates
DNS Assistant supports both integration patterns, and it is worth being precise about what that means so you can scope the work accurately.
What is provided: a documented API you can pull from, and webhook delivery you can push to your own endpoints. Both directions are supported, so you can run webhooks for real-time high severity alerts and scheduled API pulls for bulk ingestion or backfill, exactly the combined pattern described above. Alerts can also route to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and SMS in parallel, so SIEM ingestion does not have to be your only channel.
What is not provided: prebuilt, vendor certified connectors. There is no Splunk app to install, no Elastic integration package, no Sentinel data connector in the gallery. You connect DNS Assistant to your SIEM using its API and webhooks, which means some integration work on your side: pointing a webhook at your collector, or scheduling a job that polls the API and forwards results.
For most teams this is modest work, typically configuring an HTTP collector endpoint and a small amount of field mapping, but it is real work rather than a one click install, and you should scope it that way. If a turnkey marketplace connector is a hard requirement for your environment, that is a fair thing to raise with us directly.
The signals available to send cover the full posture picture: record changes across all monitored types, dangling DNS and subdomain takeover detection across 22+ cloud providers, subdomain discovery, email authentication health, TLS and DNSSEC status, and WHOIS and expiration changes. Alongside the live feed, a viewable change history audit trail and data export in CSV, Excel, or PDF give you a second path to the same information for reporting and evidence.
Where This Fits in Your Security Program
Routing DNS into your SIEM is one expression of a broader idea: that DNS is security telemetry and deserves the same treatment as the rest of your stack. That principle sits at the heart of DNS Posture Management, and it maps directly onto the continuous-monitoring pillar of a Zero Trust approach to DNS. A DNS event that never reaches the place your analysts work is a signal you technically collected but functionally ignored.
Get Started
To see what DNS signals look like for your own domains before wiring anything up, inspect records with the free DNS lookup tool or run a Free Domain Risk Report.
To start generating continuous DNS security events you can route into your SIEM via API and webhooks, start free at dnsassistant.com.
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