Helpdesk asks who had .55 last Tuesday.
MMC shows the current lease — or nothing.
Someone exports CSV from last month’s backup.
Someone else pings and calls that “history.”
A ping is not a grant. An export is a snapshot someone remembered to take.
Lattice occupancy is every remaining lease row dhcpd already wrote. Paste an IP, MAC, hostname, or switch port. As-of a calendar day on this computer. CSV is the hold table (Who had this IP).
Three questions people mix up
Search — who has it now?
Audit — who reserved .10?
Occupancy (History) — who held .55, for how long, which MAC, which port?
Windows shops collapse all three into “check DHCP.” That is why last Tuesday turns into a ticket to neteng with a packet capture attached.
In Lattice those are separate surfaces on purpose. The grant is the occupancy log. Rows are not pruned for comfort (Who had this IP).
What Windows actually gives you
Windows DHCP answers the current lease, or whatever you exported. MMC does not answer last Tuesday. If the lease renewed overnight, the prior holder is gone from the live view.
ISC dhcpd.leases can answer if the file still has the old binding and someone knows how to read it under pressure. That is not an occupancy product. That is archaeology.
How to ask last Tuesday in Lattice
More → History. Paste the IP (or MAC, hostname, switch port). Lattice detects which. Fill As of with that calendar day (YYYY-MM-DD on this computer) or an RFC3339 instant. From/to clips overlapping holds. Readonly roles can look. Export CSV when you need the hold table.
For the whole VLAN last Tuesday: open the subnet and use As of on the address map — not a History paste of a CIDR. Occupancy is who held each address at the end of that day (or “now” if you pick today). Reservations, assignments, and excludes on that map are the current plan. They do not time-travel (Who had this IP).
Cutover honesty
Occupancy starts at the first Ack Lattice grants.
Windows lease tables, dhcpd.leases, and Kea dumps do not import.
Dump scopes and reservations, map them, POST the catalog, point relays. History fills as clients Renew (Migrate, How to dump Windows DHCP scopes).
If you need a paper trail from before cutover, keep the old export. Do not expect Lattice to invent a past it never saw.
Why one catalog matters here
Prefixes, subnets, pools, reservations, and leases are one catalog. dhcpd serves those rows. Console writes them. There is no second lease store to reconcile with a spreadsheet of “used” IPs (latticeddi.com).
When helpdesk pastes a suffix and lands on the lease, neteng is not the lookup API. When someone asks last Tuesday, occupancy is the answer — not a capture first.
The same catalog is why a reservation is the next Offer, and why Discover on one node and Ack on another can be the same pool under HA. Occupancy is not a bolt-on reporting SKU. It is the lease rows you already granted.
A Tuesday ticket that should not need a capture
Printer offline. Badge says .55.
Helpdesk: “Who had this IP yesterday afternoon?”
Old answer: export, hope, ping, escalate.
New answer: History → paste .55 → As of yesterday → CSV.
If the row shows a different MAC than the printer’s sticker, you have a wrong reservation or a rogue client — not a mystery layer-2 ghost. If the row is empty, either Lattice never granted that address (still on Windows for that VLAN) or the lease aged out and you are looking at the wrong day.
Occupancy does not replace switch CAM tables. It replaces “MMC doesn’t know.”
Soft product without soft claims
Managed IPs still meter leased + reserved + quarantined + assigned. Occupancy is those lease rows, not a separate analytics product. Community includes History on one node. HA does not change what a grant means — only where dhcpd runs (Pricing, HA).
Soft next step
Prove Search on a live MAC today. Then ask History for an IP you know changed hands last week. If As of returns rows, you have occupancy.
Still on Windows scopes? Soft-read Replace Windows DHCP and Why switch off Windows DHCP and the spreadsheet. Community signup covers 1,000 managed IPs on one node. A 30-day Starter trial in the portal tests three-node HA when you need it (Pricing, Signup).
latticeddi.com