NMS Overview
Kentik NMS is covered in the following topics:
About Kentik NMS
Kentik's Network Monitoring System (NMS) provides a base layer of visibility for your network by discovering and monitoring network infrastructure. Our NMS implementation supports traditional use cases like detecting if a device goes down, graphing interface statistics, sending alerts, and creating dashboards. Kentik NMS supports data collection from SNMP and Streaming Telemetry, and normalizes the collected data for consistency across dashboards, queries, and alerts regardless of the source.
Note: For details on using Streaming Telemetry for Kentik NMS, see NMS via Streaming Telemetry.
NMS Documentation
The following articles provide detailed information about various aspects of Kentik NMS:
- Kentik NMS Agent: Learn about Kentik's Universal agent for NMS, which collects metrics from NMS-monitored network entities.
- NMS Dashboard: The NMS Dashboard is the landing page for the Network Monitoring System section of the Kentik portal. The dashboard enables you to quickly understanding the current status and performance of your network via a customizable set of visualizations and tables.
- Metrics Explorer: Query any aspect of your infrastructure to get the big picture about your network or dive deep into the details of individual data sources.
- NMS Devices: See availability, health, and performance information for all devices that you've configured (with our agent) to report NMS data to Kentik, and get extensive details about individual devices.
- NMS Interfaces: See availability, health, and performance information for all interfaces on your NMS-monitored devices, and get extensive details about individual interfaces.
- Query Assistant: Get answers about your infrastructure from queries that Kentik derives from your natural language questions.
- NMS Setup: Use the NMS Setup wizard to discover the devices in your network infrastructure that you'd like to monitor with Kentik NMS.
In addition the above NMS-specific articles, the role of NMS is covered throughout our articles on Kentik's alerting system, including in the following articles and topics:
- About Up/Down Policies
- NMS Details Drawer
- NMS Alert Details Page
- Up/Down Policy Settings
- Add an Up/Down Policy
- Add an NMS Threshold Policy
Note: The above articles are provided within the framework of the Knowledge Base, but while NMS is in "private release" they are not listed on the KB's Contents tab and their content is not searchable with the KB's search function.
NMS Quick Start
Adding NMS to Kentik is a straightforward process involving the following steps:
- Deploy and run the Kentik Universal agent: NMS metrics come from your infrastructure to Kentik via a collector agent that is installed in the environment whose infrastructure you'd like to monitor. The agent can be deployed via Docker or Linux. For further information and step-by-step instructions, see NMS Setup Wizard.
- Choose the devices to monitor: When the Universal agent is deployed and run it begins "discovery," which is the process of finding all SNMP-enabled devices within the specified IP ranges. You can then choose which devices to monitor and start monitoring those devices (see NMS Discovery).
- Monitor metrics about your network: The metrics sent from your infrastructure to Kentik will be visible on the pages of the NMS section of the Kentik portal (listed in NMS Documentation above).
Expanding Your NMS Capacity
Every Kentik customer subscribes to a Kentik edition that is augmented with one or more Kentik plans (see About Licenses), and every Kentik edition includes some NMS capacity (see Metrics Limits by Edition). To expand your organization's use of NMS beyond the below-listed limits, you'll need to supplement the included NMS capacity of your edition by purchasing an NMS Metrics plan. Once an NMS Metrics plan is added, you'll see it on your Licenses Page.
Metrics Limits by Edition
The table below shows the NMS capacity, in metrics per second (MPS), included with Kentik's various editions.
Edition | MPS | Network Devices |
Platform Essentials | 100 | 3 to 10 |
Pro | 250 | 8 to 25 |
Premier | 250 | 8 to 25 |
Classic | 100 | 3 to 10 |
NMS Device Support
Support for devices in Kentik NMS is covered in the following topics:
About NMS Device Support
The metrics presented in Kentik NMS are collected from devices by the Kentik NMS Agent. Because datapoints are not all available from device vendors in a standardized form, Kentik tests a variety of common devices, determines where and how the needed information is available, and normalizes that information into a unified presentation across vendors. While we can't test every device on the market, we do keep a list of the devices that we've successfully tested (see NMS Supported Devices).
Note: Kentik is able to add device-specific datapoints to our data model. If datapoints for your devices are missing in Kentik NMS, or you'd like to add unique data points, please see Custom Device Profiles or reach out to your Customer Support team for assistance.
NMS Supported Devices
The devices below have been tested to work with Kentik NMS.
Note: Testing is ongoing. If you have questions about a specific vendor/model, please contact Kentik Customer Support.
Vendor | Model |
A10 | vThunder |
Accedian | AMN-1000-GT |
Adva | FSP150-GE104 |
Adva | FSP150-XG108 |
Adva | FSP150-XG118PRO |
Alteon | Application Switch 6420 |
Alteon | Application Switch 6420 |
Alteon | Application Switch 6420XL |
APC | Masterswitch rPDU |
APC | Network Management Card |
APC | SmartUPS 450 (mislabeled?) |
Arista | Arista DCS-7280QRC-36-M |
Avocent | Avocent model acs8008 |
Avocent | Avocent model acs8032 |
Cisco | 4331 ISR |
Cisco | 8520 WLC |
Cisco | ASA 5585Ssp60 |
Cisco | ASR 1001X |
Cisco | ASR 1002HX |
Cisco | ASR 1004 |
Cisco | ASR 1006 |
Cisco | ASR 9001 |
Cisco | ASR 9006 |
Cisco | ASR 9010 |
Cisco | ASR 9010 |
Cisco | ASR-1002-X |
Cisco | ASR-9001 |
Cisco | ASR-920 |
Cisco | ASR-9906 |
Cisco | ASR-9910 |
Cisco | C9200CX-8P-2X2G |
Cisco | Catalyst 29xxStack |
Cisco | Catalyst 37xxStack |
Cisco | Catalyst 4900-M |
Cisco | Catalyst 4948-10GE |
Cisco | Catalyst 4948-E |
Cisco | Catalyst 6509 |
Cisco | Catalyst 8500L-8S4X |
Cisco | Catalyst 9200 |
Cisco | Catalyst 9200CX |
Cisco | Catalyst 9300 |
Cisco | Catalyst 9500 |
Cisco | Catalyst 9500 Virtual |
Cisco | Catalyst C68xxVirtualSwitch |
Cisco | Catalyst C9500-40X |
Cisco | Catalyst C9500-48Y4C1 |
Cisco | CRS-16 |
Cisco | CRS-8 |
Cisco | Firepower 4120-SM-24 |
Cisco | Firepower 4120K9 |
Cisco | Firepower 4125 |
Cisco | Firepower 4415 |
Cisco | Meraki Cloud |
Cisco | Meraki MR42 |
Cisco | NCS 5011 |
Cisco | NCS 540-24Z8Q2C-M |
Cisco | NCS 540L28Z4 |
Cisco | NCS 5501 |
Cisco | NCS 5501SE |
Cisco | NCS 5502SE |
Cisco | NCS 5508 |
Cisco | NCS 55A1-36H-SE-S |
Cisco | NCS-1002 |
Cisco | NCS-540 |
Cisco | NCS-5508 |
Cisco | NCS-55A1 |
Cisco | NEXUS 5596UP |
Cisco | NEXUS 7000 |
Cisco | NEXUS 7010 |
Cisco | ONS 15454 |
Cisco | SNS 3600 |
Cisco | Virtual ASA |
Cisco | X2960X |
CloudGenix | CloudGenix ION 3000 |
F5 | bigipVcmpGuest |
Fortinet | vFortigate |
Gigamon | Gigamon device |
Gigamon | GigaVUE-HC2 |
Gigamon | GigaVUE-TA10 |
Infoblox | Infoblox IB-1420 |
Juniper | MX204 |
Juniper | QFX 5100-24Q |
Juniper | QFX 5100-48S6Q |
Juniper | QFX 5120-48Y8C |
Lantronix | Lantronix SLC |
Mikrotik | CRS125-24G-1S |
Mikrotik | CRS310-8G+2D+ |
Palo Alto | PA-800 series firewall |
Palo Alto | Palo Alto Virtual |
pf_sense | pf_sense |
Ubiquiti | Ubiquiti Edgerouter Series |
Using NMS via API
The tables and graphs returned from queries in the Metrics Explorer module of Kentik NMS can also be accessed via API:
- In Metrics Explorer, click the Actions button in the SubNav, then hover on Show API Call from the drop-down menu.
- In the resulting submenu, choose one of the following:
- For Data: Opens the Data API Call via cURL dialog, which contains cURL that will request the Metrics Explorer's current table from a CLI such as Terminal.
- JSON Input: Opens the Data API JSON Input dialog, which contains JSON that can be used in a request body. - Copy the code in the dialog (manually or using the Copy to Clipboard button).
- Use the code to get NMS results from a call made with the Query Data Method of the Kentik Query API.
The example below is a snippet of the JSON returned from a query called using the procedure above when the Query sidebar is set to its default settings.
{
"data": [
{
"timeseries": [
{
"timestampMillis": 1719497880000,
"in-utilization": 0,
"out-utilization": 0
},
{
"timestampMillis": 1719497940000,
"in-utilization": 2354,
"out-utilization": 2420
},
// etc
],
"last_in-utilization": 2289,
"last_out-utilization": 3136,
"device_name": "qfx_iad2_kentik_com",
"name": "irb.130",
"ifindex": 687
},
// etc.
]
}