Is there a way to get kernel panic information to log to either the local machine via a log file (I'm assuming possibly no, since it's panic'd) or would I have to enable remote syslog or netdump to remotely forward this over to another system?
Sometimes, we either don't get a screenshot, or the system is automatically rebooted (via ASR, etc), so I need another way to retrieve the kernel dump information.
You need to set up remote syslog logging and the netconsole modules so that when it panics it will dump the panic over UDP to your remote machine. This will work as long as the network card isn't involved in the panic :) See http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/networking/netconsole.txt (which is from the kernel source) for details or http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-netconsole-log-management-tutorial.html for a tutorial/howto.
Kpanic won't hit a file, and it definately won't hit a remote server log. to do what you want, you'll have to setup serial console and log to that. then on another machine, read the serial data and log it from there. I know of no other way to do it.