This article covers how to migrate from Kentik’s legacy kproxy agent to Universal Agent for collecting NetFlow & SNMP telemetry from your network infrastructure devices.
Overview
Still using Kentik’s kproxy standalone software agent? You’ll want to deploy Kentik’s Universal Agent (UA) and take advantage of its Flow Proxy and SNMP/ST capabilities as summarized in this migration checklist:
Deploy UA and enable the Flow Proxy and/or SNMP/ST capabilities.
Update your devices and access lists with UA's IP address.
Configure devices in Kentik for SNMP flow enrichment or full monitoring.
Decommission the legacy
kproxyagent.
Did You Know?: Flow enrichment is included when the device has a FlowPak license. Full monitoring requires a Kentik NMS DevicePak license, and includes many more features including deeper metric visibility, health monitoring, syslog, traps, and SSH access for configs, scrapes and ad-hoc investigation with AI Advisor.
Why Migrate?
Kentik’s Universal Agent (UA) provides a centralized framework for ingesting network telemetry. Consolidating telemetry collection into the UA architecture offers several operational benefits:
Future-Ready Innovation: The UA is the designated agent platform for all future Kentik feature investments. New capabilities, such as advanced NetBox integrations for infrastructure correlation, are developed exclusively for the UA framework.
Resource Efficiency: The UA serves as a high-performance source for both Flow data and SNMP metadata. This centralized approach optimizes the processing load on network infrastructure by coordinating telemetry requests through a single, efficient framework.
Architectural Consolidation: The UA replaces disparate installation procedures and security audit surfaces with a single, managed extension of the Kentik SaaS platform.
Prerequisites
Verify the following environment requirements before beginning the configuration:
Host Environment: A physical or virtual host running a supported Linux distribution or an environment with Docker container support.
Agent Registration: The Kentik UA is installed and registered within the Kentik portal.
Access Control: Administrator permissions for the Kentik portal and appropriate network access (UDP/SNMP) between the host and managed network devices.