Kea (software)

Kea is an open-source DHCP server developed by the Internet Systems Consortium, authors of ISC DHCP, also known as DHCPd. Kea and ISC DHCP are both implementations of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, a set of standards established by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Kea software is distributed in source code form on GitHub,[2] from various ISC sites, and through a number of operating system packages.[3][4][5][6][7] Kea is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.[8]

The Kea distribution includes a DHCPv4 server, a DHCPv6 server, and a Dynamic DNS (DDNS) server. Significant features include: support for IPv6 prefix delegation, host reservations (which may be optionally stored in a separate back end database), PXE boot, client classification, shared networks, and high-availability (failover pairs). Kea can store leases locally in a memfile, or in a PostgreSQL, MySQL,[9][10] or Cassandra database. Kea has a supported API for writing optional extensions, using 'hooks'.[11]

Kea has a graphical management application, called Stork, that integrates an agent running on the Kea server, an exporter to a Prometheus time-series data store, a Grafana template for data visualization, and the Stork web dashboard. Like Kea, Stork is licensed under the MPL 2.0 license. The Stork dashboard provides a simple graphical display for managing one or many Kea servers. Current features include server status, pool utilization, high-availability status, host reservations, and leases per second. Via the integration with Grafana it also provides detailed statistics on DHCP messages over time. Stork is a very new project and features are being added rapidly in monthly releases.