NMS Policy Settings

The settings for NMS policy types in Kentik's Alerting system are detailed here.

Notes:

• For information about Flow policy type settings, see Flow Policy Settings.

• For background on Kentik’s Alerting system, first read Alerting, Alerting Page, Notifications, and Mitigations.

Including the General tab (see Flow Policy Settings), for NMS policy types the following alert policy settings tabs are available:

• Dataset

• Activate & Clear

• Baseline

• Dashboards & Labels (Classic Threshold policy type only).

Dataset Settings (NMS)

The Dataset settings tab of an NMS alert policy is where you define the scope of NMS telemetry data that the policy will evaluate.

• Measurements: Click the field to select one or more NMS metrics from the dropdown menu (e.g., /kentik/agent/cpu, /kentik/agent/memory). Selected metrics appear as lozenges; click the X on any lozenge to remove it.

• Devices: Specifies which infrastructure components or agents this policy will monitor.

  • All Devices: Monitors all available infrastructure by default.

  • Edit Devices: Opens the Data Sources dialog to filter by specific devices, Sites, or Labels.

• Dimension Filters: Narrow the scope of monitored data based on specific dimension criteria (see Filters Settings). Click Add Dimension Filters to open the filter configuration workflow (see Group By Dimensions).

Data Sources Dialog

The Data Sources dialog allows you to add devices to the alert policy, including:

• Search: Enter terms to filter the Device Selector list.

• Cancel: Click the X at the upper right, or Cancel at the lower right, to exit the dialog without saving.

• Device Selector: Left pane listing methods of selecting devices:

  • All Devices (default): Include all devices.

  • Labels: Add devices by selecting one or more labels (see Labels).

  • Sites: Add devices by selecting one or more sites (see Sites).

• View Selections: Right pane summarizing device selections:

  • Lozenges for each selected label/site

  • Click X to remove the selection

  • Click > on a site lozenge to show assigned devices

• Save: Click Save to confirm the device selections and exit.

Activate & Clear Settings (NMS)

The Activate & Clear settings tab of an NMS alert policy is where you configure the technical rules and thresholds that must evaluate to true to trigger an alert.

Severity

• Severity Dropdown: Assign a severity level (Minor, Warning, Major, Severe, Critical) to the alert state generated by this policy.

Alert Condition Groups

Build conditional logic rules using nested groups and operators.

• Logical Operators: Choose all or any from the dropdown to determine how multiple condition groups or individual conditions are evaluated together.

• Condition Criteria: For each rule line, specify:

  • Measurement: The base NMS metric path (e.g., /kentik/agent/cpu).

  • Metric: The specific type of evaluation (e.g., Utilization or Times).

  • Operator: Choose the relational operator (e.g., equals, greater than).

  • Value: Enter the threshold value (the UI will indicate expected formats, such as percent as float or float).

• Add Actions: Click + Add Condition to add a row inside the current group, or + Add Nested Condition Group to create a deeper logical subset.

Operational Behaviors

• Acknowledgement Required: Turn On to require an operator to manually acknowledge the alert before it can progress or clear (see Alerts List).

• Manual Clear Required: Turn On to require an operator to explicitly close out the alert once metrics return to normal (see Alerts List).

• Notification Channels: Select or search for routing destinations (e.g., Slack, Email) where alerts should be sent. Click Add New Channel to build an integration on the fly (see About Notification Channels).

• Test Notification Channels: Click to send test notifications to all assigned channels. Active only when notification channels are selected.

• Activation Delay: Specify the number of minutes to wait before officially firing an active alert. If the condition clears during this window, no alert is sent.

• Clearance Delay: Specify the number of minutes to wait before officially clearing a resolved alert. If the condition triggers again during this window, the alert remains active.

Baseline Settings (NMS)

The Baseline settings tab of an NMS alert policy is where you configure the historical data buckets and aggregation methods used to establish normal (i.e. baseline) traffic patterns for comparison.

Note: NMS policies use the same underlying baseline configuration engine as Flow policies.

Baseline Presets

Select one of the cards at the top of the tab to instantly apply a baseline configuration:

• DEFAULT: Collects 25 keys an hour, going back 4 weeks. Recommended for most general uses.

• PRECISION: Collects 300 keys an hour, going back 4 weeks. Recommended for highly accurate sampling.

• EXPRESS: Collects 25 keys an hour, going back 1 week. Recommended for a quick setup.

• CUSTOM: Automatically selected if you manually alter any of the preset values below.

About Your Baseline

The About Your Baseline pane is a dynamically generated text block confirming the metric being measured (derived from your selected paths in the Dataset tab) and the time interval for data points (e.g., 60 Seconds).

Building & Using the Baseline

• Window: How far back the history goes (e.g., 4 weeks from 1 day ago) to determine the bucket count.

• Bucket depth: The number of top keys collected in every hour of the window.

• Rollup aggregation: The mathematical method (e.g., 98th Percentile) used to handle the hourly data points.

• Compare to: Determines which historical buckets are evaluated against current traffic (e.g., the current hour of every day of the week).

• Bucket width: Derives the value from just that hour or by aggregating surrounding hours.

• Final aggregation: The math method used to combine values into a single comparison metric.

• Use separate patterns for weekdays and weekends: A checkbox to calculate UTC weekends independently from weekdays to account for regular business-cycle variations.

Dashboards & Labels Settings (NMS)

The Dashboards & Labels settings tab of an NMS alert policy allows you to organize your policy and associate it with relevant visualization tools within the Kentik platform.

Note: There are no dashboard settings available for NMS Policy Types. See Dashboards & Labels Settings for information about using labels.

NMS Policy Types

The following table describes the policy types for NMS alert policies, listing the related metrics for each: