PAiCore Launches DRA-CT Edition: A Management GUI for Extended Diameter Routing Agent

PAiCore Technology today announced the DRA-CT Edition with GUI (v3.0.0-103), a browser-based management layer for its open source Extended Diameter Routing Agent (DRA) — bringing graphical configuration, live operational visibility, and multi-instance fleet management to a routing core that has run in production for years.

Just weeks after opening the core DRA to the community as version 3.0.0, PAiCore is extending it with an operations layer built for teams running Diameter routing at scale. The DRA-CT Edition doesn’t change how the DRA routes, distributes, or manipulates Diameter message, that logic is carried forward unchanged. What changes is how operators interact with it.

From configuration files to a control plane

The open source DRA has always been configured through XML rule files, edited by hand and reloaded. The DRA-CT Edition replaces that workflow with a Management GUI backed by a management service that applies every change to the running node over its management interface, and reads the result back for confirmation.
That includes:

• Graphical configuration of peer identity, network, peers, realms, and application identifiers — as validated forms, not raw XML.

• Routing rule administration, including explicit, conflict-safe reordering of rules — since the DRA evaluates rules in the order they’re declared, getting that order right matters, and the GUI won’t let two operators silently overwrite each other’s changes.

• Host and rule association, so a destination host’s priority, weight, and AVP-rewriting behavior can be managed once and reused across every rule that points to it.

• A live operational view of gateway and peer state, read directly from the node — nothing inferred, nothing cached longer than it should be.
• Lifecycle control to start and stop the Diameter stack or individual peers without restarting the node.
• One-click configuration import, so a DRA node already running in the field can be brought under GUI management by reading its existing configuration files, rather than starting over.

Built for fleets, not just single nodes

The second major addition is multi-instance management. A single DRA-CT deployment can register and administer many DRA nodes, each addressed and isolated independently — a peer named hss-01 on one node never collides with a peer of the same name on another, and a request scoped to one instance simply cannot touch another’s configuration.

Every status check also verifies that the node answering is still the node the operator thinks it is, comparing the live Diameter identity against what was recorded when the instance was first registered. If a host gets re-provisioned, a port gets reused, or a config gets mistyped, the GUI flags the mismatch before any change is applied — a small detail, but the kind that matters when one dashboard is managing several production nodes at once.

Access is role-based across all of it: ROOT administers users, ADMINISTRATOR configures DRA instances and manages non-ROOT users, and VIEWER gets read-only visibility into configuration and live state — with authorization decided before a request is even read.

Open core, still

The DRA-CT Edition sits on top of the same open source DRA core that PAiCore released to the community, and reflects the model behind all of PAiCore’s products: the routing engine stays open, and the operational tooling that fleets and enterprise teams need is where PAiCore’s commercial support comes in.

Get started

Full technical details are available in the DRA-CT Edition with GUI release notes. Teams already running the open source DRA can adopt the GUI without disrupting live traffic — the DRA node continues routing independently of the management plane, so the management components can be introduced, upgraded, or taken down without touching the signaling path.

To see the DRA-CT Edition in action or talk to the team about production deployment, get in touch with PAiCore.