NMS: Device-centric alerting now supports SNMP trap and syslog
Feature Overview
Adding event ingestion for real-time alerts and deeper network understanding
We’re excited to announce that Kentik NMS now supports SNMP Traps and syslog ingestion, giving network teams even greater flexibility and insight when managing modern infrastructure.
With this release, Kentik NMS adds support for two of the most widely used protocols for real-time network event communication. Whether it’s a hardware failure, interface status change, or critical software log message, you can now capture, query, and alert on these events natively within Kentik.
🛰️ SNMP Trap Support
SNMP Traps are a cornerstone of traditional network monitoring, allowing SNMP-enabled devices to push events without waiting for polling intervals. With Kentik’s SNMP Trap integration, you can:
- Receive SNMP Traps in real-time
- Filter and search trap events by name and OID
- Receive policy-based alerts and notifications
- Visualize trap events alongside other telemetry for faster root cause analysis
📜 Syslog Ingestion
Syslog messages are vital for capturing detailed system-level events across a wide range of devices. Kentik NMS now ingests and parses syslog data, enabling you to:
- Collect syslog events from routers, switches, firewalls, and servers
- Filter and search syslog events by name, severity, and message content
- Create alerts and notification policies based on syslog messages
- Visualize syslog events alongside other telemetry for faster root cause analysis
Why This Matters
These new ingestion capabilities allow network operators to centralize and correlate even more telemetry within a single observability platform. Whether you're troubleshooting outages, proactively monitoring infrastructure health, or securing your environment, Kentik NMS now has the signal coverage you need.
Key Workflows
Data Explorer
Query/browse traps and syslog events in Data Explorer:
Alerting
You can also bring your query context forward from Data Explorer into NMS's alert policy workflow to alert and send notifications when specific event conditions are met.
For example, let's say we're really interested when an SNMP traps of type "ciscoConfigManEvent" shows up. From the "Add NMS Alert Policy" workflow, we start by selecting a "Policy Type" of "Event" and then an "Event Type" of "SNMP Trap".
We then create an alert condition that will trigger a Major alert when a trap arrives of type "ciscoConfigManEvent", and configure a notification to email the interested parties when it occurs.
It's that easy.
Operability
We've also included some admin views to assist in troubleshooting and setup of the SNMP Trap and Syslog Server capabilities on the Universal Agent.
Feature Requests & Bugs
This is a new feature and we're actively seeking your feedback and ideas to make it better. Reach out through your customer success rep or directly to the Kentik NMS Product Manager (Jason Carrier, jcarrier@kentik.com) if you'd like to influence our future development.