While we are embracing cutting-edge technologies such as Streaming Telemetry, our core focus has always stayed on solving our customers’ problems.

SNMP is still a widely-used protocol in network operations for managing and monitoring network devices and their functions. Now, with Kentik’s first phase of SNMP support, our customers can observe many more aspects of network devices than before: discovering devices on the network based on IP ranges or subnet, collecting information such as network devices’ OS, version, name, management IP, interface metadata, VRF settings, processors and much more.

With this additional visibility, Kentik makes it easier for operations teams to get a comprehensive picture of the devices in their infrastructure. These features support many use cases including capacity & utilization planning, and more efficient network troubleshooting.

As a network engineer, there are many problems that can be solved with detailed SNMP visibility, including:

• You can see SNMP base interface stats per interface and other Interface Classification dimensions
• You can visualize the capacity of an interface over time
• You can aggregate capacities from all backbone logical interfaces.
• You can a__ggregate the inbound and outbound utilization__ of an interface or group of interfaces

Phase 1 primarily supports a basic set of SNMP metrics such as Interface metrics, which are very similar to the list mentioned above in Streaming Telemetry. Available interface metrics include: Input Bit Rate, Input Packets, Out Bit Rate, Input Errors, Output Errors, Input Discards, Output Discards, Input Multicast Packets, Output Multicast Packets, Input Broadcast Packets, and Output Broadcast Packets. See screenshot below:

We offer a 5-minute resolution on standard polling in this initial release. In the future, we’ll support more polling rates based on the use cases and requests we see from customers.

Collecting SNMP data from the Kentik platform is flexible. Kentik can directly poll your devices from our SaaS platform, or you can use the latest kproxy agent running on any local host to act as an SNMP polling proxy.

In subsequent phases, we will support an ever-increasing part of the SNMP OID tree including full interface metrics and interface metadata. We’ll also provide full alerting capability over SNMP data.

For more information, please see the SNMP OID Polling topic in our Knowledge Base, or contact our Customer Success team.