In this paper, we argue that a broad range of Internet-scale distributed applications can benefit from an underlying low-cost consistency detection framework – an alternative to inconsistency avoidance that can detect inconsistency among nodes sharing data or services in a timely manner. . After introducing a framework of inconsistency detection, this paper presents the design and evaluation of a two-layer inconsistency detection module. The proposed two-layer inconsistency detection module is evaluated by both analysis and simulations. The results show that this framework can significantly reduce the time to detect inconsistency among nodes without adding much maintenance cost.