I have helped designed some of the network hardware and software you may have used, I'm not sure how that's relevant. Pointless D measuring.

My point stands, which is: There are a lot of capabilities in these tools that should not be overlooked or dismissed.

In addition, reachability of the service is one of the things you would note with said tools as you work your way through the stack. You can even use MTR to see if the DNS server is holding port 53 open.