As we've noticed, almost every time a table with data inside is displayed within Kentik Portal, it invariably takes no time before our users ask for it to be downloadable in a CSV format.
Additionally, AI Advisor very often displays results in a table format, because it is one of the most legible ways for our users to efficiently parse that data.

Hence, we've taught AI Advisor to display a Download CSV action button with any and every data table it displays.
This could be the end of the product announcement, but read on, it gets even more interesting.

Spreadsheets, day in to day out

If you work in the computer or networking industry, you can certainly confirm first hand that one of the most routine tasks we all end up performing every day is some variant of this sequence of actions:

1. Get some data from a SaaS tool
2. Download said data
   1. If you're lucky and the tool has the capability, export to CSV/XLSX
   2. If you're not copy it from the browser into a spreadsheet (comes with the customary prayer that it will format fine through pasting)
3. Massage the data to make it presentable to an audience

Rinse and repeat, all day every day including weekends.

Enter AI Advisor

As we are all making more and more room for AI Advisor to boost productivity, the aforementioned loop gets less taxing, thanks to this new Download CSV button mentioned earlier. Just take a look at the example below where I'm asking AI Advisor to give me a list of the top inbound ASN to my network by traffic:

We could call it a day and close the product announcement here, but I really wanted to make it worth your read here, so bear with for another paragraph, will you?

Cranking it up a notch

As mentioned earlier, there's always some amount of massaging you'll want to do on tabular data before presenting it to someone else.
The previous example is no exception. Right now I'm getting a table with the following columns 1) rank 2) AS Name, 3) Avg Traffic.

What if I wanted to:

• display the ASN registration country in its own column for further filtering, and in a way that's human readable
• add a link on each row to the peeringDB record for each network (arcane knowledge, you can reach the PeeringDB page of any ASN via this URL format: https://peeringdb.com/asn/ )

Let's go.

I know, you're welcome 😉