As you may or may not know, the CDN Analytics module in our Premier platform edition leverages a powerful and constantly evolving engine to detect all CDN IPs around the world and assign them to CDNs it knows about. The number of CDNs our engine is able to detect, as well as the precision with which it can identify their IPs inside or outside of your networks, keeps improving over time as it learns.

Two new CDNs covered by our CDN detection engine!

This time around, our engine has learned of two new CDNs: EdgeNext and Netskrt. EdgeNext is a commercial CDN with a strong focus and footprint in Asia. Netskrt is a software/appliance-based CDN that specializes in last-mile caching for broadband ISPs, often referred to as a "Cache Embedding CDN" - they are one of these new-gen CDN Providers in providing technology for last mile caching but also match-making Content Providers with Broadband Providers (Qwilt is another one of them)

As you can see in the CDN Analytics workflow UI, this takes our engine from an impressive 60 CDNs detected to 62!

The special treatment Embedded CDNs get in our workflow

Embedded CDNs are identified as such by our engine, which attempts to auto-detect IP ranges of such embedded caches on your network based on Interface Classification (Connectivity Type, and Provider attributes of your interfaces).

If your Interface Classification is configured thoroughly and sets interfaces to Connectivity Type = Embedded Cache with an Interface Provider = "netskrt" then our CDN engine will pick them up and automatically classify the IP Range they're on as CDN IPs, associated in this case to the Netskrt CDN Name.

If your embedded caches are on network devices that aren't exporting flow and SNMP data to Kentik, we also give you the opportunity to manually enter them and help make this engine smarter, via CDN Analytics > Configuration > Additional Embedded Caches.

Beyond these capabilities, one of the key aspects of embedding CDNs is how much offload they yield, i.e. how much upstream bandwidth they help you save – in other words, how efficient are they. For every new embedded CDN we add, we also add CDN Analytics landing page widgets to display this offload percentage.

This iteration is no exception – we've added both Qwilt and Netskrt widgets to your landing page. To enable/disable these widgets, go to CDN Analytics > Configuration > Landing Page and see for yourself which ones you want activated.

If, like Pokemon, you gotta catch 'em all, your CDN Analytics workflow landing page can look a little like this:

Take this feature for us spin and let us know if you like it !