Synthetics Agent Overview

This article provides an overview of Kentik's ksynth-agent synthetics agent.

Notes:

• For a general explanation of synthetic monitoring in Kentik, see Synthetics.

• For assistance with any aspect of the agent setup process, contact Kentik (see Customer Care).

About Synthetics Agent

Kentik is able to perform continuous synthetic performance testing from and to network locations both within your infrastructure and elsewhere around the Internet. These tests are enabled by Kentik’s ksynth-agent software agent for synthetic monitoring.

Synthetics Agent Types

The ksynth-agent software agent for synthetic testing includes the following modes, known as agent types:

Synthetics Agent Deployments

Kentik's synthetic testing agent is used in the following types of deployments:

• Global Agents: Available to every customer that has activated our synthetic monitoring services, "global agents" are the agents in the Kentik Global Agent Network, a worldwide network of Kentik-maintained ksynth agents. Hosted in data centers and public clouds, these agents enable performance testing to and from key Internet hubs worldwide.

  Note: In some portal contexts, the subset of global agents that is deployed in the infrastructure of key cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, etc.) is referred to separately as "Public Cloud" agents.

• Private Agents: Every Kentik customer can deploy as many ksynth-agent instances as they care to in their own on-prem and/or cloud infrastructure (no additional license required). These private agents are for the exclusive use of the customer who deploys them (not available to other Kentik customers).

Deployment Considerations

The following considerations apply when deploying ksynth-agent.

ksynth-agent Protocols

ksynth-agent uses the following protocols:

• For communication between ksynth-agent and Kentik's SaaS platform (US or EU):

  • TCP 443 (HTTPS)

• For network tests (IPv4 and/or IPv6):

  • Ping: ICMP or TCP (with option to specify target port)

  • Traceroute: UDP or TCP (with option to specific target port)

  • ICMP Echo ping

• For HTTP(s) or API Tests:

  • HTTP GET/ POST/ PUT/ PATCH sent to TCP port 80/443

Allowing ksynth-agent

When running one or more ksynth-agent instances on your network, the domains in the table below should be allowed in your firewall rules to ensure that the agents can communicate with Kentik.

NTP Configuration

The server on which ksynth-agent is installed must be configured as an NTP client to avoid known issues related to clock skew. If the NTP service is correctly configured, the following command should return successfully:

sudo ntpq -p

ksynth-agent Security

The ksynth-agent agent generates a unique identity and uses this to authenticate with the Kentik platform. The identity is stored in a local file to be used across restarts and upgrades.