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Charting the course: DDI Central’s vision ahead

 
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DDI Central is set to introduce comprehensive REST API capabilities across its DNS, DHCP, and IPAM modules, enabling seamless integration with third-party applications, automation tools, and custom workflows. These APIs will cover full CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete) for clusters, zones, all types of DNS records, all types of DHCP scopes, DDNS domains, and more. Additionally, administrators can program to access and retrieve DNS and DHCP audit logs, centralized lease data from the IPAM module, and detailed IP inventory statistics for VLANs and configured subnets.
This enhancement empowers administrators and developers to automate essential tasks such as record updates, lease management, and real-time data retrieval while integrating DDI Central into existing IT ecosystems. By providing a flexible and scalable interface, the new APIs streamline network management processes, support advanced automation workflows, and deliver deeper insights into network performance and resource utilization—driving greater operational efficiency and customization.
DDI Central is set to introduce a built-in IPv4 and IPv6 subnet calculator tool to simplify subnet planning and address allocation for administrators. This tool will allow users to quickly calculate subnet ranges, identify available IP addresses, and efficiently design both IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces. By providing accurate subnet breakdowns and reducing the complexity of manual calculations, this enhancement ensures precise IP planning, minimizes address conflicts, and streamlines network management for on-premises and cloud environments.
DDI Central is set to enhance its capabilities for Windows clusters by introducing support for Stub Zones and DNS Forwarders. This update will enable administrators to manage and configure stub zones, which provide a simplified way to maintain authoritative DNS records for delegated domains, ensuring faster resolution and reduced query overhead. Additionally, the integration of DNS forwarders will enable efficient query forwarding to external DNS servers, improving resolution times and optimizing DNS traffic management. These enhancements provide greater flexibility and control over DNS configurations in Windows environments, empowering administrators to streamline operations and improve overall network performance.
WebSockets-integrated UI in DDI Central to foster real-time collaboration and prevent configuration clashes. This feature delivers DHCP log live updates and instant live notifications when multiple users are working on the same resource.When managing DNS or DHCP objects such as records, subnets, or client classes, users will be informed in real time if another user is actively editing the same resource. This ensures transparency, avoids conflicts, and enhances productivity in multi-user environments.
We are enhancing real-time alerting capabilities in DDI Central with a dedicated UI alerts page, complementing the existing email notifications. This new feature delivers immediate, actionable alerts within the UI for key network events, including:
  • Access attempts to blocked sites in the DNS Firewall Blacklist.
  • New IP leases issued.
  • New MAC addresses detected in the network.
  • DNS or DHCP service failures.
  • IP availability and utilization thresholds for each subnet for better capacity planning and resource optimization
  • Customizable query thresholds to notify when specific query levels are reached across domains. This enables administrators to set specific DNS query limits for domains across all clusters. It triggers alerts when predefined thresholds are exceeded, helps monitor query traffic to detect spikes, unusual patterns, and potential DNS abuse. Enables proactive issue resolution, such as addressing overuse, mitigating DNS-based attacks, and preventing performance bottlenecks.

This enhancement ensures administrators have instant visibility into critical network events, enabling quicker response times and more proactive management.
Centralized log management with rsyslog integration in DDI Central enables administrators to collect logs from multiple ISC DNS and DHCP servers into a single location, ensuring comprehensive visibility and streamlined monitoring. By consolidating logs, administrators can quickly identify and correlate events for efficient troubleshooting, handle log data from large-scale deployments without performance bottlenecks, and enhance security by storing critical logs in an offsite centralized server. This capability enables administrators to leverage third-party tools like ELK (Elastic Stack), Graylog, or Splunk for advanced parsing, indexing, for actionable insights, giving them greater control over log data for proactive issue resolution and efficient operations.
To improve searchability and management in extensive networks, DDI Central will introduce advanced filters and pagination for domains, subnets, and leases. This enhancement will enable administrators to quickly locate and manage records with ease, even in large-scale deployments, ensuring efficient operations.
DDI Central aims to enhance its IP address management capabilities by introducing support for hierarchical supernets, allowing users to create a supernet within an already existing supernet. This feature enables the establishment of multi-level IP address hierarchies, offering greater flexibility and scalability for large, dynamic networks. By organizing IP blocks into nested supernets, administrators can achieve more granular control over IP allocations, improve segmentation, and optimize resource utilization.
This functionality is particularly beneficial for enterprises managing extensive IP ranges, as it simplifies complex network IP address plans and enables efficient IP resource planning, monitoring, and management of hierarchical IP structures. DDI Central will provide an intuitive interface for visualizing these nested supernet hierarchies and applying relevant policies across each level, ensuring seamless and organized network operations.
Graphical visualizations for DNS, DHCP, and user audits
DDI Central is introducing advanced graphical visualizations to enhance the auditing experience for DNS, DHCP, and user login/logout activities. This feature will utilize line graphs to showcase trends in create, update, delete, and import operations across all managed DNS and DHCP objects over customizable time ranges, providing administrators with clear insights into daily activity patterns, peaks, and trends.
In addition to DNS and DHCP operations, graphical visualizations will be available for user login/logout activities, helping admins monitor user access behavior and detect anomalies. With customizable time filters, administrators can focus on specific periods for a tailored and in-depth analysis of events. This intuitive approach simplifies audit reviews, ensures network configurations remain consistent and reliable, and streamlines the tracking of system and user activities.
Flexible data export: Export audit logs as PDF or CSV
Admins and operators can now export detailed tabular audit data within both DNS and DHCP modules into PDF or CSV formats, enabling easier reporting, sharing, and offline analysis of DNS and DHCP operations.
DDI Central is set to revolutionize its DNS analytics capabilities with a range of new updates designed to provide deeper insights and advanced monitoring.
Enhanced DNS query response analytics
The DNS Query Analytics page is being upgraded to include detailed insights with rich visualizations that provide detailed breakdowns of response codes or error types, such as NOERROR, NXDOMAIN, SERVFAIL, and more. This enhancement provides administrators with a comprehensive view of response patterns, enabling deeper analysis of DNS performance and error trends for blocked and hosted zones.
Instant host identification for streamlined troubleshooting
Additionally, administrators will be able to see the MAC addresses associated with IP addresses querying specific zones, allowing for instant identification of hosts and streamlined troubleshooting.
Enhanced non-hosted domain analytics
A dedicated page will display KPIs for non-hosted domains, including queries per second, total query counts, and request type breakdowns, offering a holistic view of external DNS traffic.
Powerful IP Summary for quick insights
To enhance usability, DDI Central will introduce an "IP Summary" page, enabling admins to search by IP address and view comprehensive data along with rich visual breakdown for the query and response count analytics of on all accessed resources associated with that IP, ensuring quick and precise analysis.
Exportable query analytics for better reporting
DDI Central now enables administrators and operators to export DNS query analytics tabular data into PDF or CSV formats. This feature enables seamless sharing, reporting, and archiving of critical query insights.
These updates are aimed at empowering administrators with actionable insights, improving network transparency, and ensuring optimal DNS performance.
DDI Central will enhance its static lease management capabilities with tools to ensure the real-time status of statically provisioned IPs. DDI Central will automatically ping all the IP address under a static subnet to verify if a static IP is actively leased or available ensuring precise accountability.
DDI Central is introducing two new user roles—Audit User and Guest User—to improve role-based access management. The Audit User role limits users to only view DNS and DHCP audit logs across all clusters without the ability to make any modifications, ensuring transparency and accountability. The Guest User role enables users to view all configurations made across all clusters but restricts them from making any changes, maintaining system integrity. These roles ensure controlled access, align with security best practices, and cater to users requiring monitoring or observational access without administrative privileges.
DDI Central is enhancing visibility for Windows clusters by displaying the number of domains with Windows Active Directory-powered dynamic IP updates. This update provides administrators with quick insights into the distribution of static zones with static IP address mappings and dynamic zones enabled for dynamic IP updates within the cluster. By offering clear visibility into DNS record management, this enhancement simplifies monitoring and streamlines the management of both static and dynamic DNS zones.
DDI Central is introducing the capability to bulk import subnets and DHCP reservations (Windows) or host configurations (Linux) directly into its intuitive interface using CSV files. This feature simplifies the onboarding and management of large-scale DHCP configurations, enabling administrators to quickly add multiple subnets and reservations in one streamlined action. By reducing manual input and potential errors, this enhancement improves efficiency, ensures accuracy, and accelerates the deployment of DHCP resources across the network.
DDI Central is set to introduce a comprehensive configuration feature, allowing administrators to customize polling intervals and data retention settings for key DNS, DHCP, and audit processes. With this enhancement, admins can define refresh intervals for DNS, DHCP, DDNS, and lease discovery, ensuring real-time synchronization and optimized network performance. Additionally, retention settings for leases, DNS query data, and audit logs can now be tailored to specific organizational settings, enabling efficient storage management and compliance. This feature empowers administrators with granular control over DDI Central's operations, ensuring better performance, enhanced visibility, and streamlined resource management across the entire network.
For Windows clusters, DDI Central is set to introduce a Service Reconfiguration feature to simplify the recovery process for failed or ejected DNS and DHCP servers. If a server goes down, administrators can now seamlessly replace it with a new server using the same IP address. By navigating to Settings -> Server and selecting the Reconfig option from the actions menu, all DNS and DHCP data previously hosted on the original server will be automatically pushed to the new server with a single click. This eliminates the need for manual data restoration, ensuring minimal downtime and a swift recovery process. The feature streamlines server replacement, helping administrators maintain service continuity and network stability effortlessly.
For the managed Windows DNS and DHCP servers, DDI Central is set to introduce a server and zone rediscovery feature to ensure configurations remain synchronized when changes occur outside its interface. If updates to DNS or DHCP configurations are made via Windows UI, PowerShell scripts, or other remote management tools, administrators can use the Rediscover option under Settings -> Server to automatically detect and sync these changes within DDI Central. Additionally, a single click on a zone name will rediscover the latest configurations from the primary or master server and update the changes into the DDI Central console. This streamlined process eliminates manual intervention, ensuring up-to-date configurations, centralized visibility, and consistent network management.