Get insight into your DDI environment with Live DDI Analytics

Standard management tools for DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (together known as DDI) provide core functions for managing DDI. However, they often fall short when it comes to reporting and analytics. 

In today’s complex enterprises, where DNS and DHCP servers and IP address management tools are often deployed across cloud environments, this shortfall hinders optimization.  

With Live DDI Analytics, a new add-on tool for BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance, robust reporting and analytics that provides real-time insights into your DDI environment is now at your fingertips. 

In this post, we’ll first touch on why DDI reporting and analytics are crucial. Next, we’ll introduce our new Live DDI Analytics tool built on the Infrastructure Assurance platform. Then, we’ll delve into Live DDI Analytics’ capabilities and benefits. Finally, we’ll share how you can get started by enrolling in our technology preview. 

The need for DDI reporting and analytics

DNS and DHCP servers and IP address management tools are increasingly deployed across public, private, hybrid, and multicloud environments. Effective performance management in this complex landscape often requires more than what standard DDI management tools can offer. 

Standard tools provide essential functions—such as discovery, management, access control, and monitoring of DDI environments—but they rarely provide robust reporting and analytics data. Advanced reporting and analytics are essential for the insights needed to improve performance and streamline management. 

With the complexity of today’s distributed DDI environments, DDI reporting and analytics can provide valuable information to optimize DDI management and performance. 

New from BlueCat: Live DDI Analytics

Live DDI Analytics is a reporting and analytics tool built on the Infrastructure Assurance 25.1 platform. It works across BlueCat’s Integrity and Edge solutions. 

With Live DDI Analytics, you can easily explore, visualize, and interact with your DDI environment. As a result, you can uncover relationships and key insights, helping you make more informed decisions. It offers unmatched visibility across public, private, hybrid, and multicloud environments.   

Live DDI Analytics includes a dashboard overview of real-time statistics for your DNS and DHCP servers and IP address management tool. A relationship map displays servers, top requested domain names, historical analysis, and query data. You can access and display reports, analytics data, and device information using an intuitive graphical user interface.

Who is it for?

IT professionals from numerous disciplines—including network engineers, security analysts, application developers, operations, and IT management—can use Live DDI Analytics to collaborate on DDI discovery and inventory of devices and on performance improvements. 

How does it work?

Live DDI Analytics is built on top of the Infrastructure Assurance platform. This allows it to leverage pre-built services like authentication and data storage. Furthermore, it utilizes existing integrations with other tools, such as ServiceNow. 

For Integrity users, Live DDI Analytics retrieves DDI information from BlueCat Address Manager (BAM) using the BAM v2 RESTful API to discover BlueCat DNS/DHCP Servers (BDDSes) and their configuration. For Edge users, Live DDI Analytics retrieves information from your cloud instance to discover Service Points and their configuration. 

The retrieved data is stored in a long-term database. 

The Infrastructure Assurance platform

Infrastructure Assurance auto-triages issues in your DDI environment. Informed by vetted, community-sourced experience, it collects relevant data from your DDI infrastructure components and analyzes it according to known best practices. It automatically alerts you to identified issues and provides recommended actionable remediation steps. 

With Infrastructure Assurance, IT operations teams can avoid costly outages if they receive advance notice about common issues that can lead to bigger problems. 

Infrastructure Assurance with the Live DDI Analytics add-on offers a comprehensive solution for automated issue triage with robust real-time data analysis and insights. 

Live DDI Analytics capabilities and benefits

Live DDI Analytics offers several capabilities, including: 

• Data visualization: With clear and customizable views, easily navigate complex DDI data and quickly identify critical information. Create charts, graphs, and other visuals to represent data in multiple ways. 
• Interactive logical topology and geospatial maps: Visualize your DDI environment, including high availability pairs, understand relationships, and identify potential vulnerabilities. Explore and interact with your environment through clicks, filters, and drill-down capabilities. 
• IPAM usage: Optimize and simplify IPAM (IP address management) with IP address usage data, such as available address space. 
• Real-time updates: Update visuals in real time as data changes. 

A key benefit of Live DDI Analytics is inventory and discovery. You get an accurate understanding of all the DDI devices connected to your network, including hardware and configuration details.  

Further, you can explore, visualize, and interact with your DDI environment. And with a clear real-time view of your multicloud DDI environment, including the relationship between devices, connections, and activity, you can easily spot inconsistencies. 

Technology preview available now

A technology preview of the Live DDI Analytics add-on tool is available now for select existing Infrastructure Assurance 25.1 customers. There is no additional license fee. 

A technology preview provides customers with an early introduction to a new product, feature, or concept that is still in development and intended to be part of a future release. This preview is accessible to a limited set of users to test through a feature flag and is disabled by default. 

New customers can try the free trial version of Infrastructure Assurance 25.1, which includes a technology preview of Live DDI Analytics. 

The technology preview does not include support from BlueCat Customer Care or warranties. However, peer discussion and limited support are available through BlueCat’s Network VIP community. 

The technology preview is available for as long as you run Infrastructure Assurance 25.1. However, if you upgrade to Infrastructure Assurance 25.2, the Live DDI Analytics functions will be grayed out unless you purchase a Live DDI Analytics license. 

Ready to try it? To enroll in the technology preview, please contact your BlueCat sales representative.