Stork 2.0: Open Source DHCP Management Tool
ISC launched the Stork management application almost exactly five years ago, in November 2019, as an experimental tool.
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ISC launched the Stork management application almost exactly five years ago, in November 2019, as an experimental tool. Today, Stork is a robust and valuable management application, and with this release full commercial support is also available.
Maintain DHCP Service Uptime
When your DHCP system isn’t configured correctly, or you have reachability problems, or a server has failed, it is an urgent problem. It is critical to find out and restore service quickly before other network services that rely on DHCP start failing. Stork can enable you to monitor a multi-server DHCP system quickly, making changes in status obvious and easy to spot.
Stork is an open source project that provides a web-based graphical interface for monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintaining the configuration of Kea DHCP servers. Stork provides a layer of administrative control for your Kea servers, including integration with LDAP for administrator authentication and authorization.
Identify problems fast
A graphical interface is particularly helpful for spotting red flags quickly. The Stork agent can pull information from both the Kea server and the platform it is running on, combining configuration information with current state.
- Monitor CPU and OS data, including speed, memory, memory usage, operating system, and software versions
- View DHCP pool utilization, including shared network utilization
- View lease activity statistics, or search for an individual lease to view details
- See which Kea servers are in a High Availability relationship and monitor their failover status
- Click to view Kea server log tails, or to check on connectivity between Stork and Kea
- Spot changes in DHCP traffic activity in customizable Grafana charts
Perform frequent, recurring, configuration tasks more easily
Stork allows every member of the administration team to make configuration changes, without having to remember CLI commands. A built-in configuration checker will verify these before applying them.
- View the current running configuration of any Kea server in JSON structured format
- Configure and manage DHCP host reservations via GUI*, including related DHCP options
- Configure and manage subnets and pools via GUI*, including labeling Grafana tables with subnet names
(*) These two features require commercially licensed Kea hooks, which implement the Kea API for remote management of these functions.
New Stork demonstration system
Still not sure?
Recently, we have launched an online Stork demo system and we invite you to try it out at: https://demo.stork.isc.org/login. This demo version resets every hour. If you would prefer a more extended trial, you can install our packaged demo version, which includes a DHCP traffic generator, a handful of virtual Kea servers, and of course the Stork agents and server. One of our QA engineers has recorded a short video that walks you through the entire installation process for the demo.
Stork 2.0 - The First Stable Version
This release of Stork addresses an important security requirement: users are now required to change their password from the default startup password upon first usage. The login screen is now customizable, so the administrator can add local instructions. Stork now reports on newer software versions available (although with this release that information is static, it will be dynamic in the future). There are many other bug fixes and updates, including updated Grafana templates, and we have suppressed some repetitive log messages that users found annoying.
With this release, the Stork team will begin maintaining a stable version for production usage, while releasing new features on a Stork 2.1.x development branch. We plan to create a new stable version every six months, to maintain our rapid development cadence, and support each version for a total of nine months to allow time for migration. Please refer to the ISC Software Support Policy to learn about the planned Stork release schedule.
Download and Installation
To download Stork sources, go to ISC’s Downloads page. Release notes are posted beside the tarball download link. Most users prefer to install our packages for Debian, Alpine, or RPM-based systems from ISC’s Cloudsmith repo.
The Stork Quickstart Guide will get you up and running quickly. The Stork Administrator Reference Manual (ARM) may also be helpful.
Stork Professional Technical Support Available
With this release, ISC is now offering professional technical support for Stork. This will be offered as a line-item on a Kea DHCP support contract. Support for Kea is available as an annual subscription, with several levels:
- Bronze - Premium and Subscriber hooks; ASNs; email support during business hours
- Silver - Premium, Subscriber, and the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) hook; ASNs; 24x7 email and phone support with SLAs
- Gold - Premium, Subscriber, and the RBAC hook; ASNs; 24x7 email and phone support with faster response times
The annual cost of our Kea support subscriptions is based on deployment size, as measured by the number of simultaneous leases provided. For more information on the support options, please see our Support page and our Kea Support Subscription datasheet. Please feel free to contact us for more information.
