Settings Overview

The main settings for the Kentik portal are covered in the following topics:

• About Settings
• Settings Categories

Note: Many portal settings are initially made during the Kentik onboarding process, which includes onboarding your organization and onboarding data sources (on premises and in public clouds). For information on initial setup procedures, please refer to Setup Overview.

Settings are the administrative controls that enable you to tailor your Kentik setup to make it work most effectively for your organization. These settings are accessed via the following locations in the Kentik portal:

• Main settings: The primary settings for daily use of the portal are accessed from the portal's Settings page, which is opened from the link in the left column of the main navbar. These settings are covered in the remaining topics of this article.
• Organization and User settings: These settings are accessed from the Organization Settings menu and the User menu, both of which drop down from the portal's main navbar. For information on these settings, see Org & User Settings.

Note: While member-level users can access most of the pages linked to from the Settings page, most will only allow admin-level users to manage Kentik settings.

The portal’s Settings page is laid out as panes that each contain a set of cards related to a category of settings. Each card contains a link to an individual settings page. The Settings page is organized into panes that correspond to the categories covered in the following topics:

• Data Sources
• Alerting
• Kentik Agents
• Network Metadata
• Data Enrichment

A data source is any network entity that generates network traffic data that is ingested into the Kentik Data Engine (KDE), where it is monitored and analyzed. This pane includes links to the admin pages for two main categories of data sources:

• Networking Devices: Links to the Devices page for device settings and status. Devices are the routers, hosts, switches, firewalls, etc. that make up the physical infrastructure deployed in your sites such as data centers and branch offices. For Kentik to receive data (flow records, SNMP, BGP, etc.) from a given device that device must be configured (on the device) to connect with Kentik and also registered with Kentik in the portal or via API. An indicator shows how many devices are configured.
• Public Clouds: Links to the Public Clouds page to register your resources (e.g. VPCs and subnets) that are hosted by public cloud providers (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, or OCI) and also manage the generation and ingestion of flow logs from those resources. An indicator shows how many public clouds are configured.

Notes:
- If any of your data sources are incomplete, missing flow, or require additional configuration, the Data Sources pane will display a notification that includes a Review your devices button. Click the button to go to the Device Status Page.
- For assistance with any aspect of configuring or registering a data source, please contact Customer Support.

Kentik’s alerting system is implemented via alert policies which are essentially a set of comparative evaluations that, when matched, can trigger an alert, which results in an action such as a notification and/or a mitigation. This pane includes links to pages covering the following aspects of alerting:

• Alert Policies: Links to the Policies page, where you can add, edit, enable, disable, clone, debug, or remove alert policies, and also access the Policy Templates page.
• Mitigations: Links to the Manage Mitigations page, where you can configure mitigations to prevent undesirable traffic (e.g. a DDoS attack) from disrupting network availability.
• Notifications: Links to the Notifications page, where you can specify how users are notified for important events such as the triggering of an alert (see Notifications in Threshold Notifications). Each notification channel represents a notification mode (e.g. email) and one or more notification targets (e.g. a set of email addresses).
• Silent Mode: Links to the Silent Mode page, which lists “patterns” that each represent a set of conditions (dimension/value pairs) that, when matched, will prevent alerts from triggering on matching traffic.

Kentik uses a variety of software agents to gather data and perform other tasks that support operation of the Kentik platform (see About Kentik Agents). Some agents are configurable only in their own CLIs, but others may be managed via the portal:

• NMS Agents: Links to the NMS Agents page, where you can manage your organization’s NMS agents and see their status.
• Proxy Agents: Links to the kproxy Agents page, where you can manage your organization’s kproxy agents and see their status.
• Synthetics Agents: Links to the Agent Management page, where you can manage your organization’s private instances of ksynth, our software agent for synthetic testing (see Kentik Synthetics Agents).

Network metadata enables Kentik to help you better understand the structure of your network and how your traffic moves through it, providing better context and value. This pane includes links to administrative pages for the following types of network metadata:

• Manage Interfaces: Links to the Interfaces page, where admin-level users can add and remove interfaces on your organization's Kentik-registered devices and edit the settings of those interfaces.
• Manage Sites: Links to the Sites page, where you can get information about the physical location (for devices) or cloud region (for public clouds) of your data sources. An indicator at right shows how many of your organization's data sources are already assigned to a site.
• Manage Site Markets: Links to the Site Markets Page, where you can add and edit site markets (logical groupings of sites with common characteristics). An indicator at right shows how many site markets are already configured.
• Interface Classification: Links to the Interface Classification page, where you can establish network boundaries and categorize connectivity based on interface metadata. An indicator at right shows the percentage of your organization's interfaces that have already been classified.
  Note: Only admin-level users can access this page.
• Network Classification: Links to the Network Classification page, where you can define your IP space and ASNs, allowing us to directionally classify traffic in relation to your network.
• Labels: Links to the Labels page, where you can apply labels that logically associate devices in any way that you want, which allows you to create analytics that stay in sync as your network evolves.
• Saved Filters: Links to the Saved Filters page, where you can create and manage a saved set of filter conditions that you can store and apply at a later time.

Data enrichment enables your organization's flow data to be correlated with additional information that provides a richer picture of your network and a better understanding of traffic patterns:

• AS Groups: Links to the AS Groups page, where you can assign Autonomous Systems (ASes) to a group whose traffic will be summed for the purpose of top-X evaluations and filtering in queries.
• Custom Dimensions: Links to the Custom Dimensions page, where you can add business context to your organization's network data by supplementing Kentik's built-in dimensions (see Dimensions Reference) with dimensions that you define for your own specific needs.
• Custom Applications: Links to the Custom Applications page, where you can define the characteristics — specific values for protocol, port number, IP address, and/or ASN — of an application that will be associated with all traffic sharing those characteristics.
• Custom Geos: Links to the Custom Geos page, where you can map your traffic with business context by assigning countries to custom groups for querying via group-by or filter dimensions from the Custom Geo dimension family.
• Flow Tags: Links to the Flow Tags page, where you can create tags that become part of the flow record for traffic that matches tag-defined criteria, enabling you to query for traffic matching a given tag.
  Note: Only admin-level users can access this page.