Stork Graphical Management for Kea DHCP

Centralize monitoring and configuration

Stork - Open Source Graphical Management

Stork is an open source project that provides a 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.

What are the components of the Stork solution?

Stork is comprised of two components: the Stork server (stork-server) and the Stork agent (stork-agent). Stork interacts with the Kea servers via the agents, installed on each Kea server. One Stork server is deployed in a network, providing an integrated, centralized front end for these services. The Stork server can integrate with Prometheus and Grafana for warehousing and visualizing DHCP usage data.

Stork leverages several of the optional Kea hook libraries. We strongly recommend Stork users install at least the lease_cmds and stat_cmds on Kea servers they want to manage with Stork. Kea may optionally be deployed with a database backend for host reservations, and if it is, Stork will manage the host reservations in the database. Most Kea users deploy the optional high availability hook - if your Kea servers are configured to work as HA pair then Stork will use this library to display the HA status. Stork requires the subnet_cmds hook installed on the Kea servers in order to modify subnets and pools: it also enhances the metrics passed to Prometheus by including subnet labels. Without this hook, Prometheus identifies subnets by subnet IDs. The subnet_cmds hook is commercially licensed.

Stork does not require nor integrate with the optional Kea configuration backend.

Key Features

Monitor CPU and OS data, including speed, memory, memory utilization, operating system and version
Auto-discover Kea services on monitored machines with application software version and uptime since last reload
Monitor DHCP pool utilization, including shared network utilization
See which Kea servers are in a High Availability relationship and monitor their failover status
Manage DHCP Host reservations, one of the most frequently updated elements of the DHCP server configuration
Configure subnets and pools (requires the commercially-licensed Kea Subnet Management hook)

Stork is open source, shared under MPL2.0 licensing. Stork is developed in the open on ISC’s GitLab; we welcome you to open issues and submit patches there. Stork runs on most Linux and Unix platforms, as well as MacOS. If you don’t want to build from our source distribution, we also provide a repository of pre-built packages for most popular operating systems, for both Kea and Stork.

Contact ISC for Support

Getting Started

Design

Your major design decisions are whether to deploy in pairs for High Availability and use the default csv file for host and lease data, or to install a separate database for a Kea data “backend.” Some of these decisions can limit your performance. See our Knowledgebase for advice on designing for optimal performance.

Installation

Instructions are available for building and installing Kea from the source packages downloadable below. ISC provides pre-built packages for RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. If you are using any Kea hook libraries, you will also need to install and configure those.

Configuration

The Kea Administrator Reference Manual (ARM) is the primary reference for Kea configuration. The extensive set of example configuration filesin the project repo and our knowledgebase may help you get started. If you are migrating from an existing ISC DHCP deployment, try the Kea Migration Assistant (a special feature of the ISC DHCP distribution). This will enable you to save your current ISC DHCP server configuration as a Kea configuration file. It will still need some manual adjustment, but this tool should translate the bulk of your configuration.

Maintenance

Most users will benefit from joining the stork-users mailing list. Consider joining our Stork project GitLab to log issues, see what we’re working on, submit patches, and participate in development. You might want to read about our Premium and Subscriber-only Kea libraries, which Stork uses for management. If your DHCP is critical to your business, we recommend you subscribe for technical support from ISC.

screenshot of stork graphical web-based management tool for Kea, showing a list of subnets and their utilization, monitored servers and their current uptime status

Stork Dashboard for Kea

Monitor both the machine and the application

Stork aggregates data about the health of the system hosting Kea, as well as the status and activity level of Kea itself. Parameters reported include memory, CPU utilization, software versions, and uptime.

Monitor Pool Utilization and High Availability

Stork displays configured pools, with # of addresses provisioned and assigned and even tracks pool utilization across shared networks. Graphical elements highlight areas of high utilization to alert the operator to take actionHigh Availability pairs are monitored and their configured role and status are shown, making it easy to see which servers don’t have a backup established, and when a failover event has occurred.

Manage Host Reservations

Add, update and view DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 host reservations, using a graphical interface to select a host identifier, assign a hostname, reserve an IP address, associate a client class, and configure boot file information and DHCP options.

The Kea distribution includes separate daemons for a DHCPv4 server, a DHCPv6 server, and a dynamic DNS (DDNS) module. Bundled with Kea are a portable DHCP library (libdhcp++), a control agent that provides the REST management interface for Kea, a NETCONF agent that provides a YANG/NETCONF interface, a DHCP benchmarking tool, perfdhcp. The dynamically loadable hook libraries included in the MPL2.0-licensed open source distribution are: Bootp, Flexible Options, High Availability, Lease Commands, Run Script and Stats Command.

Reconfigure without restart

Add and change subnets and pools using Stork. Select which Kea servers to apply these changes to. Note that this requires Kea to be installed with the Subnet Commands hook, available to software support subscribers.

Managing High-availability

Kea high-availability mode provides resilience for either DHCPv4 or DHCPv6, using either a 50/50 load-balancing or active/standby configuration. This feature is implemented with the HA hook library, part of the open source. Stork provides visibility into HA pairings, and the current status of each member of the HA group.

Graphical Management Dashboard

The Stork dashboard is a web-based system that displays critical information about service availability, CPU and memory capacity, pool utilization, failover status and DHCP traffic statistics. Stork integrates with the popular Prometheus time-series data store and Grafana visualization system. Stork is available as open source from ISC’s GitLab repository, or in a ready-to-install package from Cloudsmith.io.

The Premium package of Kea hook libraries is a low-cost way to extend your open source Kea server with optional, commercially-licensed features. Hooks in the Premium package include: DDNS Tuning, Flexible Identifiers, Forensic Logging, and Host Commands. Stork relies on the Host Commands hook for managing host reservations in Kea. Contact our friendly sales team to buy these commercially-licensed libraries.

Host Commands library

Host reservations may be stored in a separate database, giving the administrator additional flexibility in creating and managing a large number of host configurations. The Host Commands hook library exposes an API for managing host reservations in the backend.

Forensic Logging

The Forensic Logging application creates a separate log that may be useful for meeting law-enforcement data retention requirements. Updated versions of this hook include the ability to create a custom forensic log format, logging the specific information you need to retain.

ISC Support Subscribers receive all our Premium Kea hook libraries, PLUS several additional libraries that will be most useful in larger deployments. Stork may leverage the following Kea subscriber hooks. These hooks are licensed under the ISC HBCEULA. ISC Support is offered as an annual subscription.

Leasequery

The Leasequery library allows you to retrieve a single lease, identified by IP address, hardware address or client identifier. Bulk leasequery is supported with Kea 2.3.5 and later versions.

Ping Check

The Ping Check library adds the ability to perform a ping check of a candidate IPv4 address prior to offering it to a DHCP client. This feature is similar to a behavior available in ISC DHCP and one suggested in RFC 2131. Ping check is supported with Kea 2.5.4 and later versions.

Subnet management

The Subnet Commands library allows you to add, remove, and modify subnets via the API, without resending the entire Kea configuration.

The Enterprise features are reserved for customers with Silver or Gold support from ISC. This new tier includes the Role-based Access Control feature. This hooks is licensed under the ISC HBCEULA. Contact our friendly sales team to buy a support plan that includes this commercially-licensed library.

Role-Based Access Control

The RBAC library, supported with Kea 2.2 and later, allows the administrator to control authenticated user access to read and write Kea configuration data.

Stork

VERSION	STATUS	DOCUMENTATION	RELEASE DATE	EOL DATE	DOWNLOAD
1.16.0	Development	Stork ARM ( HTML ) Release Notes ( TXT )	April 2024	on-going development branch

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Report a Bug

Before submitting a bug report please ensure that you are running a current version. Then log your report as an issue in our Stork GitLab project.

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Stork Project Site

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