Since Kentik’s founding, our core focus has been to provide a 360° view of the performance, composition, and paths of actual network traffic. We started with visibility for owned/on-prem infrastructure. As more and more organizations have incorporated cloud infrastructure, we’ve extended our traffic analytics to follow suit, first by integrating with GCP VPC Flow Logs this past summer, and now with support for AWS Flow Logs. By enabling a unified view across all of your infrastructure — whether it’s on-prem, hybrid-cloud, or multi-cloud — Kentik is now a complete infrastructure visibility solution.

Out-of-the-Box GCP and AWS Visibility

Need cloud visibility, but you’re not sure where to begin? No problem! To get you started we’ve now expanded our portal Library with a broad set of predefined dashboards that provide detailed views of cloud network traffic flows. You’ll find these preset dashboards under Cloud and Data Center in the Library sidebar. As shown below, there are eight dashboards for AWS and nine for GCP. Several are highlighted in the Library’s Featured Content (indicated by an orange check mark).

Our cloud dashboards are a joint effort of our field engineering and solution engineering teams. They’re based on real-world customer scenarios, such as investigating rejected traffic that utilizes the security action field (accepted/rejected) in AWS Flow Logs. For GCP, we’ve created dashboards that use the RTT_MSEC field in GCP flow logs, which measures application and network latency, to help you analyze the performance of your services and applications in Google Cloud.

We’ve also incorporated some of these same cloud metrics into alert policy presets that we’ve added to our Alerting Library. These new policies can identify unexpected changes in the source, destination, or composition of traffic in key parts of your cloud infrastructure.

AWS VPC Flow Logs Integration

As mentioned above, Kentik now integrates with AWS. If you have workloads running in VPCs on AWS, Kentik can now ingest the AWS VPC Flow Logs as a primary data source for analytics.

The steps to connect AWS infrastructure and add AWS VPC Flow Logs as a data source are fairly straightforward:

1. Create an AWS Role - In the AWS IAM console, create a new AWS role with permissions that allow access by Kentik’s AWS services.
2. Create an S3 Bucket - In the AWS S3 console, create a bucket to which logs can be published and from which Kentik can pull them.
3. Configure Log Publishing - In the AWS VPC Dashboard, configure each VPC (or subnet or interface) to publish logs to a destination folder in the bucket.
4. Confirm Log Publishing - Back in the S3 console, confirm that logs for each VPC are being published to the destination folders in the bucket.
5. Register Cloud in portal - In the Kentik Detect portal, create a new Cloud pointing to the S3 bucket (as shown below), which results in a Kentik “cloud device” being automatically created for each destination log folder.

Once the new AWS Cloud is added it will appear in the Admin » Clouds page with details including name, provider, and status.

AWS Marketplace Integration

Last but not least, Kentik Detect is now available in the Amazon AWS Marketplace. Customers can simply pick a plan and subscribe to the Kentik analytics service on AWS.

For complete Cloud Visibility information, please see the Kentik for AWS and Kentik for GCP topics in the Kentik Knowledge Base or contact the Kentik Customer Success team at support@kentik.com.