A gateway is the on-site collection point for Ntrospect: it receives OTLP from local agents, listens for NetFlow/sFlow and syslog from your network gear, polls SNMP, and forwards everything to the central collector.

Before you start

  • A Linux host (VM or hardware) at the site with outbound reachability to your Ntrospect server.
  • Your Organization Key, found under Settings → Agent Config → Registration.
  • Confirm the Server address (reachable from agents) on that same page is set to an address your sites can actually reach — this is baked into install commands.

Install

Copy the gateway install command from Settings → Agent Config → Gateway and run it on the host. The installer registers the gateway to your organization and starts it as a systemd service. New gateways appear under Gateways in the sidebar within a minute.

If TLS is enabled for gateway transport (Settings → Agent Config → Gateway TLS), use the auto-TLS install variant so the gateway trusts the platform CA on first boot.

Assign it to a site

Under Settings → Sites, create or edit the site and associate the gateway. Add the site's Subnets to scan (one CIDR or IP per line) so discovery and flow attribution know what belongs there. Set a Fallback gateway only if this site can be served by another gateway when no local one has direct access.

Optional: cluster for high availability

For sites that can't tolerate a collection outage, run two or more gateways as a cluster. In the cluster panel on the Agent Config page, configure:

  • Cluster Name
  • Virtual IP (VIP) — e.g. 10.0.1.100/24; devices and agents send to this address
  • Network Interface the VIP binds to
  • VRRP ID (1–255, unique per L2 segment)
  • Site Label and member gateways

The cluster elects roles automatically, balances polled devices across healthy members, and fails over the VIP if a member goes dark. Role state and transfer controls live on each gateway's Roles tab.

Verify

On the gateway's page, check the Discovery tab and run a scan against one of the site's subnets. If devices come back, the gateway is ready for protocol configuration — see Configuring Flow Collection and Setting Up SNMP Polling.