For several years, kprobe has served as a flexible bridge for our community, providing deep host-level visibility and DNS insights. However, the requirements for modern network observability are changing. To ensure our customers are equipped with our latest innovations and highest-performance capabilities, we have officially sunset kprobe as we consolidate our engineering focus onto the Kentik Universal Agent.

This transition is about more than just a tool change; it is about providing you with a unified, high-performance foundation for the next decade of networking. We recommend all users begin transitioning to these supported alternatives to stay aligned with Kentik’s innovation roadmap.

Unlocking the Next Generation of Innovation

Maintaining disparate legacy agents limits the speed at which we can deliver value. By centralizing our development on the Universal Agent, we are creating a streamlined control plane that enables us to roll out new capabilities from advanced metadata enrichment to UI-driven orchestration, at a much faster cadence. This move ensures you are always running on our most secure, platform-agnostic, and performant code base.

The Path to Modern Observability

1. High-Performance DNS & OTT Insights

For those utilizing kprobe for DNS performance or OTT traffic mapping, the Kentik Universal Agent is your direct path forward. Our recently released DNS Tap capability is now live, purpose-built to replace kprobe’s DNS-tapping functions with higher throughput. By mapping DNS queries directly to hostnames, it provides the deep service context required for modern OTT visibility without the CPU overhead of legacy packet processing.

2. Standardized Host Flow & System Visibility

For general host-flow export and system-mode visibility, we recommend the industry-standard hsflowd. As a mature, widely adopted open-source project, hsflowd provides excellent cross-platform support and is the ideal choice for users who prioritize open-source consistency for general host metrics.

A Strategic Shift in Application Visibility
As the industry moves toward pervasive encryption (TLS 1.3), traditional application-layer packet decoding such as kprobe’s legacy HTTP decodes has become less effective for modern, secure environments. Kentik’s strategy is evolving to focus on high-scale transport-layer visibility and cloud-native insights. For specialized use cases requiring deep, unencrypted HTTP packet analysis, we recommend leveraging dedicated APM or specialized DPI tools that complement Kentik’s network-wide observability.

Timeline & Support

• Status: kprobe is officially deprecated as of today.
• Repositories: The GitHub repository has been moved to an "Archived" state.
• Support: While traffic processing and query results will remain working without any intended interruption standalone agents deprecated such as kprobe will receive limited to no new software updates. Plan your migration today. 

Ready to access the latest Kentik innovations?
Contact your Kentik account team or visit our Knowledge Base for detailed migration guides.

We are incredibly grateful to the developers and customers who helped kprobe grow, and we look forward to building the future of network observability together.

The Kentik Product Team