Agents Overview

A high-level overview of the software agents used with Kentik is provided in the following topics:

• About Kentik Agents
• Encryption Agent
• Host Agent

Note: The software agents described in this article are available for both Debian/Ubuntu and CentOS/RHEL.

Kentik uses a variety of software agents to gather data and perform other tasks that support operation of the Kentik platform. These agent-supported tasks include:

• Encryption of flow data; see Encryption Agent.
• Collecting and sending flow from a host; see Host Agent.
• Performing synthetic testing; see Kentik Synthetics Agents.
• Monitoring Kubernetes clusters (cloud or on premises): see Kappa Host Agent.
• Sending Kentik-enriched flow records to an external system; see Using Kentik Firehose.

Kentik provides a downloadable software agent called "kproxy," which is primarily used as a NetFlow proxy agent to enable the local encryption of flow records (NetFlow v5/v9, IPFIX, and sFlow) before the records are forwarded to Kentik. The machine running kproxy isn't actually handling traffic directly, but rather allows flow and SNMP from routers to be locally collected and encrypted for transport to Kentik. A single instance of the kproxy executable can redirect flow for multiple routers and switches, handling rate limiting and resampling as well as encryption. Multiple servers across the network can run kproxy to distribute traffic and load.

For information on configuring kproxy, see NetFlow Proxy Agent. Once installed and configured, an individual instance of kproxy can be managed in the v4 portal via the kproxy Agents page.

Note: Host agent mode is no longer supported for kproxy; use kprobe instead. kproxy is now used only as a NetFlow proxy agent.

Kentik customers can collect and send flow records from hosts via Kentik's kprobe host agent software. kprobe runs on a host machine that is registered with Kentik, allowing that machine to directly report flow for one or more interfaces. The agent "sniffs" traffic from the host's Ethernet port(s), creates flow records, and sends the flow records to Kentik. For information on configuring kprobe, see Host Configuration.