If you've ever stared at the output of dig example.com and only understood half of it, you're not alone. dig (Domain Information Groper) is the tool most sysadmins and DevOps engineers reach for first when a domain "isn't resolving" — but its output is dense, and knowing which line actually matters saves a lot of guessing.
Here's a quick breakdown of what a dig response is telling you and how to use it for real troubleshooting.
The four things dig output actually tells you
A dig response is split into sections, each answering a different question:
HEADER — the response status (NOERROR, NXDOMAIN, SERVFAIL) plus flags like aa (authoritative) and rd/ra (recursion desired/available).
