A steady portion of our Kentik AI Advisor work happens behind the scenes which main goal is to make it both safer and more transparent for users to feel confident when they use it.
When it comes to AI, we strongly believe that security, safety and transparency are key features, even though they're never listed as such and hardens the trust that our users place in Kentik, as well as provide the sound guardrails required for adoption to keep growing.

Today's release is about another one of these focused runs, it is about our engineering team adding guardrails around AI Advisor's Custom Network Context - read on!

AI is Magic. Sometimes too much.

As detailed in this previous post about Kentik's AI Runbooks, both the Custom Network Context (aka CNC) and Runbooks deeply affect AI Advisor's reasoning.
Imagine Kentik users whose workflow could rely on a very specific prompt, which they'd for example routinely enter every morning with their first coffee - say What's the status of my edge routers this morning ?

In this example, imagine that the list of Edge Routers is documented in their company's Custom Network Context. (which is one of the most common usages of CNC, by the way...)
Also a reasonable hypothesis: users who rely on this mapping ignore that it has been configured via CNC by a benevolent coworker.

What the above implies is the following sum of safety features:

• provide ways to track any AI related configuration change (in this case Custom Network Context)
• allow users to determine who made the change and when
• allow the security team to be able to research modifications on such configuration objects, even if they are not users of AI capabilities
• allow users to rollback such changes if it turns out that their effect on AI Advisor answers negatively impacts its answers

This is what today's feature is all about !

Side note: versioning and audit logging was already available for Runbooks, we extended them and perfected them for CNC.

Updated Custom Network Context Interface

Let's head to Company Settings > Kentik AI > Custom Network Context.
First off, we gave the default empty state a bit of a facelift, you know - while at it...

For those out there with an already populated Custom Network Context, here's what it looks like now: a right-side drawer contains every previous version with:

• Date, Author and Summary metadata attached to it
• The ability to load it in the main center section, from where the user will be able to
  • Inspect the Diff with the previous version
  • Trigger a Roll back to said version

Selecting a previous version, and then switching to Diff display mode:

Custom Network Context & Audit Log

While working on AI Safety measures for Custom Network Context, we also added support for Audit Log: with any modification on the CNC (Create, Edit, Delete), an Audit Log line is now generated, and visible in the usual Company Settings > Audit Log as displayed in the screenshot below.