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

1.

Design

Your major design decisions are about how you plan to authenticate Stork users, and whether to use some of the commercially-licensed Kea hooks. Stork leverages the Kea Host Commands hook for managing host reservations in Kea, and the Kea Subnet Commands hook for managing subnets in Kea.

2.

Installation

There is a handy Quickstart Guide for installing Stork. 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.

3.

Configuration

The Stork Administrator Reference Manual (ARM) is the primary reference for Stork installation and use.

4.

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.

Stork

VERSION STATUS DOCUMENTATION RELEASE DATE EOL DATE DOWNLOAD
1.19.0 Development Stork ARM ( HTML )
Release Notes ( TXT )
October 2024 Ongoing development branch

Latest News

Mailing List

Join the stork-users mailing list to offer help to or receive advice from other users.

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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

We organize our development into milestones.

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