NMS Overview

Kentik NMS is covered in the following topics:

Kentik NMS gathers and presents key metrics on the availability, health, and performance of your network infrastructure.
 

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:

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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:

 
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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.

 
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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:

  1. In Metrics Explorer, click the Actions button in the SubNav, then hover on Show API Call from the drop-down menu.
  2. 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.
  3. Copy the code in the dialog (manually or using the Copy to Clipboard button).
  4. 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.
  ]
}

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