DHCP Management and Monitoring

Within your network, you probably have lots of devices—each with its unique IP address. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is the protocol that’s used when assigning IP addresses to devices within your network. Additionally, DHCP keeps track of the IP addresses on your network and any subnets requiring IP addresses.

Making sure your DHCP servers distribute IP addresses properly can get complicated, but that’s where DHCP management and monitoring come in. Without proper DHCP management and monitoring, the automatic distribution of IP addresses may be thrown off, resulting in a messy networking environment, over- or under-utilizing your IP addresses, or time spent manually assigning IP addresses. On the other hand, engaging in DHCP management and monitoring will give you a clear understanding of your DHCP servers’ performance at any point in time. When you engage in DHCP management and monitoring, you’ll stay informed about IP address assignment problems and be prepared to quickly take action to prevent network disruptions and slowdowns.

While monitoring and managing DHCP is tedious and time-consuming, you can easily keep track of various metrics and issues that could impact DHCP server performance with the help of a tool like SolarWinds^® IP Address Manager. You’ll gain insights into start time, uptime, messages, and events, and you can check if your DHCP is allocating IP addresses. For example, you might look at metrics like the number of requests, declines, and releases, how many IP addresses are available, or the total scopes active on your server to better understand your DHCP server and any performance issues.

SolarWinds IPAM makes DHCP server management a breeze. With IPAM, there’s no need to invest in any additional proprietary DHCP server management software or hardware because IPAM will work with your servers, whether you’re using Microsoft, ISC, or Cisco. IPAM collects details from the devices on your network via ICMP, SNMP, and neighborhood scanning and then tracks and displays IP address usage. IPAM can easily identify and manage IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and will mark any IP addresses that are no longer being used, further simplifying DHCP server management.

You can also add new DHCP servers with IPAM, search for specific IP addresses, edit or remove IP addresses, take advantage of DHCP scope options, and change an IP address status to available, used, reserved, or transit. IPAM allows you to create IPAM subnets, view overlapping IP addresses, and resolve IP address conflicts.

DHCP server management is faster with SolarWinds IP Address Manager thanks to the updated DHCP & DNS Management view, which offers dynamic filtering, a cleaner look, and improved workflows. As a bonus, IPAM also works with BIND and Microsoft DNS servers, giving you even more control over your network.

IPAM also offers DHCP scope options, including split scope functionality. Splitting a DHCP scope will enable you to balance loads between two DHCP servers, resulting in the high availability of DHCP services. Essentially, with DHCP scope options that allow for split scope functionality, two servers will give away IP addresses from within the same scope. However, the scope will be segmented, and each DHCP server will have exclusion ranges, ensuring they don’t accidentally distribute the same IP address to different devices. Standard split DHCP scope options configurations include 50/50 and 80/20. 50/50 is generally used for load balancing purposes, while 80/20 is ideal if you’re after high availability.

To configure split scopes on DHCP servers, you’ll first need to head to the DHCP & DNS Management page and select the DHCP Scope tab. Then, you’re just a few clicks away from adding and defining scopes. If you are splitting scope for load balancing, change the offer delay to zero, but if you want high availability, choose a number between 1000 and 5000 milliseconds.

If you want to ensure a device is assigned the same IP address after server reboots, you’ll need to reserve an IP address. The good news is that IPAM makes reserving IP addresses easy, but how exactly does the DHCP reserve IP address capability work?

For DHCP reserve IP address, all you need to do is navigate to My Dashboards and click IP Addresses and Manage Subnets & IP Addresses. Find the IP Address View, choose the IP address you want to reserve, and select Set Status. Change the IP address status to Reserved and decide which type of reservation and DHCP server to use. To make a reservation on the DHCP scope managing the subnet, check Send Reservation to DHCP Server. For a reservation in the IPAM database, select Make Reservation in IPAM Only.

Freeing up an IP address is just as easy as the DHCP reserve IP address process. All you need to do is select Available from the status drop-down menu instead of Reserved. Then, click OK, check the Remove Reservation box, and hit Save.

Yes, you can monitor and manage ISC DHCP servers within IPAM. Not only can you create, edit, and remove DHCP subnets directly through the SolarWinds Platform Web Console, but you can also use the console to update servers automatically. If you want to monitor ISC shared subnet utilization, view ISC DHCP server status and availability, or manage ISC DHCP subnet pools, ranges, and options, you can do that, too. However, you’ll need to ensure everything is set up correctly to allow IPAM to access your ISC servers.

You’ll need:

• 
  Base version isc-dhcp-4.2.4-P1
  
• 
  A POSIX-compliant Linux distributions operating system
  
• 
  The user account configured to allow for remote telnet or SSH access
  
• Read and write file access on the configuration file

You’ll also need to pay attention to CLI commands, the configuration file path, the lease file path, and the script file. Once you have everything, you can configure your ISC DHCP server.

In addition to supporting basic DHCP configurations, IPAM allows for advanced DHCP configuration options that make DHCP server management and DHCP troubleshooting easier. You can configure DHCP options without logging into your DHCP server or using CLI commands, and any changes you make will be automatically synced to your server.

When it comes to managing credentials with IPAM, you have plenty of options. Not only can you add or edit SNMP, Windows, Cisco, ASA, and ISC credentials, but you can also configure BIND and Infoblox credentials. IPAM will also allow you to define and delegate user roles, which can help improve security. Examples of roles include administrator, power user, operator, and read-only, but you can also create a custom role.

You can also add Additional Polling Engines (APEs) to IPAM to reduce scan time, manually configure subnet scan settings, and create IPAM groups. IPAM even offers DHCP configuration support for your remote-boot devices.