Stork 0.10 Released

ISC is delighted to announce the release of Stork 0.10. This is a development release of the Stork dashboard for Kea. Note that we recently released a new version of Kea, Kea 1.6.3 which adds the api call required for monitoring with Stork, so you can now use Stork with Kea 1.6. Stork also works with Kea 1.7.x versions.

The notable new features, bug fixes and changes introduced in this version are:

1. BIND 9 Exporter enhancements.

The Stork Agent can now export additional statistics from a BIND 9 resolver to the Prometheus time-series datastore: queries by duration, protocol used (tcp/udp) and packet sizes. Note that use of the Stork Agent for this purpose does not require the Stork server, so it can be a standalone exporter for Prometheus. #63 (closed)

2. Log viewer for Kea.

Stork is now able to retrieve a list of log files used by Kea and display the most recent entries in them. #342 (closed), #344 (closed), #359 (closed), #349 (closed), #364 (closed)

Simple log viewer

3. Responses Per Second for Kea.

Stork now shows Responses Per Second averaged over the short term (last 15 minutes) and the long term (last 24 hours). This statistic is roughly equivalent to LPS (Leases Per Second), but it has the additional benefit of recording renewal activity and also showing responses if the server ran out of available leases. #252 (closed), #363 (closed)

Responses Per Second statistic

4. Stop Monitoring for Kea.

Kea’s Control Agent comes preconfigured with sockets for DHCPv4, DHCPv6 and DDNS. However, most deployments don’t deploy all three daemons. Stork can’t determine whether missing daemons died or were never deployed. Previous versions of Stork flagged any missing daemons as a fault. There is now a button that toggles monitoring start/stop, which is useful to squelch monitoring for daemons not deployed. #324 (closed), #339 (closed)

New control to stop monitoring a server

5. Events for communication failures.

The events subsystem has been expanded to record events in case of communication failure and reestablishment. This covers communication breakdown between the CA and Kea daemons, between the Stork Agent and the CA and between the Stork Server and Stork Agent. #324 (closed). Note that in this release, the events are displayed on the web dashboard only. We are investigating for our next release, adding alerting via some open source alerting system, possibly leveraging existing features of Grafana or Prometheus to send alerts to email or pagerduty or other channels.

6. UI improvements.

The user interface evolution continues. The DHCP dashboard has a dedicated link in the DHCP menu (#280 (closed)), although you still navigate to the dashboard by clicking on the Stork logo. The machines page has additional tooltips and the style of some tables has been updated to improve readability #112 (closed), #293 (closed).

7. Bugfixes.

• A crash when empty requests were sent to ReST API endpoints for users and machines was fixed #310 (closed), #311 (closed), #312 (closed).
• A problem with RPM upgrades was addressed. The upgrade from 0.10.0 and beyond should work. However, the upgrade from older broken packages can’t be fully fixed as the issue is in their scripts. When upgrading from older (0.9.0 and earlier) packages, it is recommended to uninstall the old package first #334 (closed).
• Stork should now work on RHEL and other systems running in FIPS mode. We now use the more secure blowfish algorithm instead of the weaker md5 hash for storing Stork passwords #356 (closed).

Please see this link for known issues: for https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/-/wikis/Known-issues

Release Model

Stork has monthly development releases on the first Wednesday of each month (with some exceptions around holidays), although we sometimes delay it a bit for last-minute changes. We encourage users to test the development releases and report back their findings on the stork-users mailing list, available at https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-users. This text references issue numbers. For more details, visit the Stork GitLab page at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/issues.

License

This version of Stork is released under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0

Download

The easiest way to install the software is to use native deb or RPM packages. They can be downloaded from: https://cloudsmith.io/~isc/repos/stork/ The Stork source and PGP signature for this release may be downloaded from: https://downloads.isc.org/isc/stork The signature was generated with the ISC code signing key which is available at: https://www.isc.org/pgpkey ISC provides documentation in the Stork Administrator Reference Manual. It is available on ReadTheDocs.io at https://readthedocs.org/projects/stork/, and in source form in the docs/ directory. We ask users of this software to please let us know how it worked for you and what operating system you tested on. Feel free to share your feedback on the stork-users mailing list (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-users). We would also like to hear whether the documentation is adequate and accurate. Please open tickets in the Stork GitLab project for bugs, documentation omissions and errors, and enhancement requests. We want to hear from you even if everything worked.

Support

Professional support for Stork will become available once it reaches the 1.0 milestone. Existing ISC customers that consider themselves very early adopters may get involved in the development process, including roadmap, features planning, and early testing, but the software maturity level does not constitute a typical professional service before the 1.0 milestone. Free best-effort support is provided by our user community via a mailing list. Information on all public email lists is available at https://www.isc.org/mailinglists/. If you have any comments or questions about working with Stork, please share them to the stork-users list (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/stork-users). Bugs and feature requests may be submitted via GitLab at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/stork/issues.

Changes

The following summarizes changes and important upgrades since the Stork 0.9.0 release.

• 92 [func] godfryd

  Improved presenting application status on machines page. Now, instead of summary app status, there are presented statuses for each daemon of given application. (Gitlab #297, #282)

• 91 [doc] tomek

  Update man pages and installation instructions. (Gitlab #202, #266, #307)

• 90 [ui] tomek

  Clarified machines page, added tooltips. Updated color scheme to improve readability of wide tables. (Gitlab #112, #293)

• 90 [bug] marcin

  Fixed an issue with refreshing log displayed within the log viewer. The issue was triggered by the periodic updates of the information about monitored apps. As a result of the updates the log file identifiers were changing which resulted in an error message informing that the viewed file no longer exists. (Gitlab #364)

• 89 [func] godfryd

  Changed md5 to blowfish as algorithm in hash function used to store password in PostgreSQL database. (Gitlab #356)

• 88 [bug] godfryd

  Fixed upgrading RPM agent and server packages. There was a problem of re-adding stork-agent and stork-server users that already exist in case of upgrade. (Gitlab #334)

• 87 [doc] marcin

  Described Kea log viewer in the ARM. (Gitlab #349)

• 86 [func] tmark

  Added tool tip to RPS columns on DHCP dashboard. (Gitlab #363)

• 85 [bug] marcin

  Fixed regression in the log viewer functionality which removed links to the log files on the Kea app pages. In addition, improved error message presentation on the log viewer pages. (Gitlab #359)

• 84 [func] godfryd

  Added stop/start monitoring button to better control which services are monitored. Communication failures now generate events that are recorded in the events system. Machine view now shows events. (Gitlab #324, #339)

• 83 [func] tmark

  Added RPS (Response Per Second) statistics to DHCP Dashboard (Gitlab #252)

• 82 [func] marcin

  Viewing the tail of the remote log files is enabled in the UI. (Gitlab #344)

• 81 [func] matthijs

  Add more query details to BIND 9 exporter and Grafana dashboard: queries by duration, which transport protocol is used, packet sizes. (Gitlab #63)

• 80 [func] marcin

  List of loggers used by Kea server is fetched and displayed in the Kea application tab. (Gitlab #342)

• 79 [ui] vicky, tomek, marcin

  Added explicit link to DHCP dashboard. (Gitlab #280)

• 78 [bug] godfryd

  Fixed crashes when empty requests were sent to ReST API endpoints for users and machines. (Gitlab #310, #311, #312)

Thank you again to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible.