Interface Classification is one of the pillars behind an optimally efficient use of Kentik for Network Observability: it helps our underlying query engine understand what enters, leaves, goes through your network. Via Connectivity Type classifications, it brings business color into your flow data. While programmatic interface classification based on SNMP data is achieved by our Interface Classification engine, we realize that not all of your interfaces always come with consistent descriptions. To solve this problem we're introducing this January a whole lot of additional Interface Management capabilities to help you take classification to 100%.

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Interface IP Address Overrides

We are now supporting the capability of overriding an interface’s IP address. This override works in the same way the other interface overrides work. Here are some example scenarios:

• The ability to set IP addresses for platforms that do not support obtaining the IP addresses of interfaces from SNMP
• The ability to remove the IP address that is obtained from SNMP
• The ability to set the IP address regardless of what SNMP provides

Static Interface Classification

Users are now able to statically classify interfaces from multiple areas in the product. This feature provides a good way for companies with loosely-enforced interface naming conventions to be able to correctly classify their traffic. This feature allows users to benefit from the full breadth of Network Explorer and all modules relying on Interface Classification.

Important: Interface Classification attributes (Network Boundary, Connectivity Type, Provider) defined statically per-interface will always supersede dynamic rules defined in the Interface Classification engine. As a result, the dynamic interface classification UI will also show when such static definitions are set.

The rules evaluation UI has also changed so that statically classified interfaces appear as such when they escape dynamic rules, as they always supersede them. An orange checkmark will indicate that an interface is statically classified, as displayed in the screenshot below:

From the Settings > Manage Interfaces Screen

Multiple interfaces can be selected and bulk-configured from the top-right Classify dropdown, and users can also access a more complete Interface Attributes config screen from the edit icon button at the end of each interface’s row.

The interface screen’s right-side filter section will assist the user in identifying unclassified interfaces, statically classified interfaces making the manual classification process easier.

Additionally, this panel will also assist users in identifying interfaces that have been statically classified, offering the selectors displayed in this screenshot, prefixed with the “Overridden” mention.

Lastly, users will also be able to reset an interface’s static configuration from the single interface configuration screen, as depicted below, by hitting the “Restore” link:

From Any Network Explorer > Interface Detail Screen

As shown in the screenshot below:

If you'd like to learn more about Interface Classification in Kentik, the best place to start is this knowledge base article.

In lieu of using Kentik’s on-the-fly reverse DNS, customers can leverage kproxy and have it query their own DNS and insert rDNS values into the Kflow data. Among other things, it allows resolution of private IPs reverse DNS, but the initial tradeoff was that it cost customers two of their own custom dimensions. Upon rollout of this feature, native Kentik dimensions will be used.

How can I use this feature?
The following Knowledge Base Article will help you configure kproxy to perform this task.

My Kentik Portal (MKP) is a multi-tenant white-label network observability service that enables Kentik’s customers to market network analytics on top of their existing services. MKP is flexible and easy to use. MKP analytics data can be customized to serve customers’ unique requirements.

What’s New with MKP?

My Kentik Portal has been ported to v4. In addition to everything available in v3, the new v4-based MKP comes with a new and streamlined landlord and tenant UI. Also, v3 was only available to Kentik Premier customers. With v4, we are now making MKP available to all customers (Classic, Pro, Premier).

Read Greg Villain's full announcement in this blog post.

A few noteworthy improvements brought with the v4 version include:

Introduction of Packages & Brandable Tenant Templates

While in practice the templates work the same, landlords now have the ability to brand them. The “Packages” tab will show the adoption of these packages across tenants.

An Overhauled View Assignment UX

Landlords can now see all the views assigned to a tenant at configuration time, whether assigned ad-hoc or as part of a template.

Options for Simpler and Safer Tenant Configuration

Tenant configuration now includes the ability to view the resulting filter as well as a direct option on all dashboards to “Preview as a Tenant.” This will append a clearly identifiable (named) filter group to the current dashboard filtering options and mimic what the target tenant will see.

Redesigned Tenant Portal UX

The redesigned tenant portal takes advantage of the screen’s real estate to display all of the analytics and alerting information at a glance. The improvements also allow for Guided Dashboard parameters to be entered directly from the landing page.

Hybrid Maps now supports path visualization in all of our layouts. With Hybrid Maps, NetOps teams gain an immediate and single, unified view to understand topology state, traffic flows, network performance and device health status within and between multi-cloud, on-prem and internet infrastructures.

To see the new path visualization, apply a sidebar filter to express the traffic you want to see visualized in the maps.

The Kentik Network Observability Platform provides the most comprehensive data across all public, private, and hybrid networking environments, including flow records, streaming telemetry, SNMP data, device configurations, and synthetic performance metrics. 

With Kentik Firehose, you can now send all this data from Kentik into your application monitoring tools (e.g., New Relic, Splunk, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, AWS S3, etc.), and publishing platforms (e.g., Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub, etc.).

For further information see the Kentik Firehose Solution Overview. 

Firehose closes the network observability gap and lets you uncover insights, and effectively troubleshoot your apps with full context and data about your networks included in the tools you use.

Examples of exportable data include:

• Flow data from NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX
• VPC flow logs from all major public clouds
• Streaming telemetry from all major vendors (Juniper, Cisco, Arista)
• SNMP device metrics (CPU, memory, network interface)
• Synthetic measurements
• Internet, ISPs, CDNs
• Correlated and context enriched data from the customer’s application, infrastructure, geo-location, business environment, and other customer-defined dimensions

Data formats include:

• Output formats: JSON, NetFlow, AVRO, InfluxDB line protocol, Prometheus endpoint
• Compression algorithm: none, gzip, snappy, null, deflate
• Data sinks: .Net, Kafka, Kentik, stdout, file, New Relic, HTTP, Splunk, and more coming
• Rollups groups: type, metric, dimension 1, dimension 2, …, dimension n.
• Filters: string, src_addr, ==, 12.0.1.2

Customers are using Kentik Firehose to:

• Troubleshoot performance in complex application environments. Network data from Kentik allows teams to understand application performance in context.
• Combine network and infrastructure data all in one place for analysis and storage. IT teams use Firehose to send data to other systems like data lakes, with formats like JSON and AVRO. This data enables more cost-effective storage and the ability to perform complex analysis, with the data all in a single place.
• Enhance cross-domain analytics to detect threats. Security and risk management teams can correlate Kentik’s Firehose data to rapidly detect, analyze, investigate, and actively respond to threats. Using data like geolocation and network flow allows for a better understanding and easier identification of threats.

Site IP Classifications

Site IP Classification provides a way to define what site traffic originates from or what site traffic terminates to. This is particularly useful for our enterprise network customers to be able to track which data centers, branch offices, infrastructure hosts, or even employees are utilizing the network.

The configuration of this mapping is in the Manage Sites page in the settings.

In the following dialog, provide a comma separated list of IP CIDRs of the appropriate networks that are located at a particular site. Doing this configuration will tag each of your traffic flows with the appropriate values in the following dimensions:

• Site by IP: The site name based on the site IP mapping
• Site Type by IP: The site type (Data Center, Cloud, Branch/Building, Connectivity PoP, Customer/Partner, Other) based on the Site IP Mapping
• IP Type (to be released soon): The IP Type (Infrastructure Networks, User Access Networks, Other IPs) based on the Site IP Mapping

New Settings Details Sidebar

Usability and design are very important to us at Kentik. We constantly look for ways to improve the readability and utility of the information that is presented. More importantly, we respond to our customer feedback. We have updated the design of a few of our most-used setting pages to provide a cleaner and more organized presentation of the most important aspects of your network — Interfaces and Devices. Take a look and let us know what you think by submitting your input via the “Feedback” link at the top right of the Kentik window.

sFlow Improvements For Visibility

We have identified a way for customers who run the sFlow protocol to achieve the benefits and visibility offered by Hybrid Maps and other portions of the product. sFlow sends Kentik per-flow byte counts attributed to physical interfaces, while most network operators configure IP addressing logical sub-interfaces. This leads to a disjointed experience in Kentik as our mapping services draw connections between devices based on the interface ID, where we find IP addresses configured. The queries needed to understand the data flowing between the devices rely upon a completely different interface ID.

To support this situation, users must supply a manual mapping of interface IDs to VLAN interface IDs. We have developed example code on how this can be automated using Juniper devices interface and VLAN names. Before running the code, the user will also need to configure the device using the new “Advanced sFlow” device type. Once the device has been modified, and a map supplied, the user can make use of three new dimensions:

• Source Physical Interface and Destination Physical Interface — the original physical interface index sent via sFlow. This is useful for filtering and grouping by the physical interface. It is also helpful for auditing the remapping correctness.
• VLAN Rewrite Occurred — the number of interface rewrites that occurred for this record. This is useful troubleshooting.

Layer 2 Support on Hybrid Maps

A new selector is available on the Hybrid Network Maps to select how Kentik draws connections between devices. Users can now choose to draw connections using layer 2, layer 3 or both.

Layer 2 connectivity requires that users run the LLDP protocol and allow Kentik to poll this data over SNMP. We will then find matches that only exist at layer 2.

Layer 3 connectivity was supported previously. Device adjacencies are determined by finding IP addresses that share a subnet smaller than a /24. We create matches for site-to-site adjacencies with the following connectivity types: Backbone, Data Center Interconnect and Device Aggregation. For device adjacencies in the site layouts, connections are displayed between devices sharing a subnet as long as the connectivity type is not configured as “Host.”

This metadata is also visible on the interface admin page:

New Onboarding Options

We are continuing to improve onboarding options to give customers and prospects more flexibility in learning about and evaluating Kentik. We now have separate paths for customers interested in flow, synthetics or a guided demo mode. The options will appear clearly on the revised onboarding page.

We have started to add guided, in-product demos of real-world use cases. We are starting with two different situation demos: 1. Troubleshoot VPN Issues or 2: Manage Network Costs. We expect to add an expanding list of use case situations over time.

Kentik's Product and Engineering teams are at it again this October 2020: a whole batch of new features have been delivered to delight our Synthetic Monitoring users - test configuration options got extended to allow the following

• we added 1 second test frequencies
• IPv4/v6 granular test configs
• new Network Test protocol choices

Read on and enjoy!

Testing Frequency

Kentik has introduced new testing frequency options that range from every 15 seconds down to every second. Furthermore, we have structured pricing for sub-minute synthetic tests to be very attractive. Kentik asks, “Your traffic is continuous, so why isn’t your synthetic testing?”

For the first time in the industry, Kentik makes synthetic testing practical for mission-critical applications such as machine, factory and warehouse automation, where high-frequency testing is required, missing nothing.

Per Test Configuration Options

We’ve added new options under the Advanced menu when creating new tests. Users can increase the number of probes sent per test (to gather more data points) or dial it down (to prevent flooding the network).

IPv4/v6

Users can now control whether a test will target both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses or just one type. This is particularly useful in Hostname and Autonomous tests, where we find a mix of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

TCP “Ping”

Choosing TCP (as an alternative to ICMP) at test creation time and specifying a destination port to test towards will result in a test that will send a certain number of TCP SYN probes and either expect a SYN-ACK or RST in response. This is currently only applicable to ping tests (not trace) and requires ksynth (agent) 0.0.6 or newer.

Reverse Path for Site-Mesh tests

Hovering over a subtest in a site-mesh test will now show path metrics in both directions and highlight both tests.

This feature exposes the current audit log, with some minor enhancements, to administrators of Kentik. Audit Log helps avoid configuration errors or confusion between administrators as they make changes to the various configurations in Kentik. Audit Log also provides a layer of accountability to prevent unauthorized changes that may impact the customer’s security posture. The ability to zero in on changes, find misconfigurations, and find root causes are typical benefits of Audit Log.