ManageEngine DDI Central | Read me

5001- February 04, 2025

1. Integrate with third-party tools via APIs supporting full CRUD operations for zones, records, and DHCP scopes. Automate lease management, audits, and real-time data analysis on a grand scale.
2. New complimentary user roles like Auditor and Guest are available to enable restricted monitoring without modifying any configurations, maintaining system integrity.
3. Simplify the design and planning of IPv4/ IPv6 subnets with a built-in calculator to allocate and design IP address spaces accurately. Quickly identify available IPs, reducing errors and streamlining network management.
4. Configure stub zones and forwarders for Windows clusters to optimize DNS resolution and improve query efficiency.
5. Centralize logging with rsyslog integration to consolidate ISC DNS and DHCP server logs. Use these logs with third-party tools like ELK or Splunk for advanced monitoring and insights.
6. Prevent configuration clashes with live updates and instant notifications for concurrent users working on the same resource. Enhance transparency and productivity in multi-user environments.
7. Analyze DNS response codes, error trends, and traffic patterns for hosted and non-hosted domains. Export query analytics data for streamlined reporting and troubleshooting.
8. Access a dedicated alerts page within the UI for immediate updates on blocked site access, IP lease issuance, service failures, DNS query thresholds, and more events. Customizable thresholds and visual UI cues enable proactive attention.
9. Simplify onboarding by bulk importing subnets, multicast subnets, DHCP reservations, DHCP filter allow/block lists, and MAC addresses for DHCP policy criteria via CSV files. Enhance efficiency in large-scale deployments while reducing errors.
10. Automatically verify the status of static IPs with real-time pings for accurate accountability. Ensure efficient management of statically provisioned IP addresses.
11. Create and manage hierarchical supernets for better segmentation and IP allocation. Visualize nested structures for scalable and organized network planning.
12. Tailor polling intervals and data retention for DNS, DHCP, and audit logs to optimize storage and performance. Ensure compliance and efficient resource management.
13. Monitor trends in operations with intuitive visualizations for DNS, DHCP, and user access logs. Export audit data in PDF or CSV formats for easier sharing and reporting.

4300- December 10, 2024

1. Windows zone discovery for 50K+ records is now reduced from 3 minutes to 40 seconds, ensuring consistent performance regardless of machine specs.
2. DNS zone discovery for servers with 100 zones (1K—50K records each) now completes in 2—3 minutes, down from 25—30 minutes.
3. The Management Console UI now loads high-volume DNS record sets within 2 seconds, down from 5 minutes.
4. Updates to AD zones via DDI Central UI now preserve and retain live timestamps, preventing disruptions to Windows AD scavenging processes.
5. Previously, NTLM authentication for LDAP on Windows servers faced issues due to a missing package. This has been resolved by including the pycryptodome library.
6. Windows DHCP MAC filtering Allow and Block lists now support partial MAC addresses, enabling enhanced pattern matching and simplified device targeting.
7. Bulk DNS record deletions are now processed in batches, ensuring smooth performance and preventing crashes caused by forced massive deletions.
8. The main dashboard now shows the exact number of servers where DNS or DHCP services are down, with hover-over details for server names and IPs, improving accuracy and troubleshooting.

4250- November 13, 2024

1. OAuth authentication is now available as an alternative to basic SMTP authentication for mail server settings, providing enhanced security and flexibility.
2. The DDI Central Management UI Console has been optimized to handle high-volume query data reaching DNS servers. Improvements in query reading speeds and memory usage minimize latency and reduce freezing under heavy query loads, ensuring smoother performance and greater stability.
3. Previously, after installing the .bin installer and adding a Windows cluster, queries to the Windows DNS servers were not properly captured in the DDI Management UI Console. This issue has now been resolved, ensuring accurate query reporting in the DDI Console.
4. Within the Windows clusters, you can now search Subnets and Multicast Subnets by their respective names, making it easier to locate specific scopes quickly.
5. Resolved the pagination issue in PTR and CAA record search, where some PTR and CAA records were repeating after a few pagination jumps. Records can now be accurately located through pagination without duplication.
6. Subnet lease duration setting issue has been resolved, where setting the lease duration to "Unlimited" on the subnet page would default to "Limited." The lease duration now remains set to "Unlimited" as intended.
7. Previously, during short bursts of high query volume, DDI Central did not capture all versioned DNS query logs created via log rotation on the managed ISC BIND servers, resulting in query count mismatches. DDI Central now accurately reads and captures all the DNS query log versions, ensuring consistency even under high query loads.
8. Previously, queries to the blacklisted domains of Linux clusters via the ISC BIND servers in the cluster were missing hostname details in DDI Central's UI Console. This issue has been resolved, and all relevant query details, including hostnames, are now accurately displayed.

4200- August 26, 2024

1. Introduced .exe-based installation for simplified setup and deployment in Windows servers
2. Introduced LDAP and LDAP over SSL authentication as an additional single-sign on capability
3. On admin consent, DDI Central now discovers all necessary configuration files, zone files, and libraries within the chroot directory, and automatically converts all relative paths within the service directory to absolute paths.
4. Frequent logout issues have been fixed.
5. Issues with scheduling records while updating DNS records have been resolved.
6. Previously, DDI Central required CNAME record inputs in full FQDN format for successful discovery. Now, it accepts and discovers CNAME records using just the hostname as input.

4100- July 10, 2024

1. Windows DNS management was launched.
2. Windows DHCP management was launched.
3. Single Sign On (SSO) using SAML authentication was introduced
4. Package dependencies for PDF report generation were resolved.
5. DDI Central is now available in the following languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch and Chinese.

4002- May 06, 2024

New Features & Enhancements:

1. Users can directly configure static subnets, manually assign IP addresses, import and manage static leases from spreadsheets, ensuring consistent network addresses for essential services and devices.
2. Migrate all the zones hosted with third-party managed DNS providers to DDI Central and manage them directly from DDI Central UI without switching between different points of management.
3. Create scheduled configurations and reports for DNS resource records and DHCP scopes. Download past report versions available for comparison and analysis to bolster change management and support compliance.
4. Delete DHCP leases via the DDI Central console, preventing lease reassignment and ensuring new leases for users. This improves control over address distribution and increases management flexibility as needed.
5. PXE boot configuration can now be configured quickly through user-friendly templates and imported into the relevant client class.
6. DDI Central now mandates that users set up an A or AAAA record for nameservers matching their domain names before usage. For example, configuring 'clouddns.com' with 'ns1.clouddns.com' requires creating an authoritative record for 'ns1.clouddns.com' first.
7. Refresh the DNS cache of a selected server or a specific zone on the server to ensure your DNS information is up-to-date.
8. Automate email notifications to admins identifying the hosts attempting to access domains that have been blocked for monitoring and reacting to potential security breaches or policy violations.
9. Node Agent installed on all DNS and DHCP servers now supports admin-controlled password resets for enhanced security, replacing the previous automatic reset system. This update allows admins to intervene directly in case of suspected breaches.
10. Admins can now choose and update the network port used by the Node Agent, providing flexibility and facilitating compliance with internal networking policies and external regulations.