We know that many of our users are fond of Kentik’s dashboarding capabilities. A quick survey of our user population shows that some users save as many as 500 dashboards or views. Taking this to heart, we’ve entirely redesigned and optimized the Library module. 

Read on for a summary of the great new things we’ve done.

Shortcuts, shortcuts, shortcuts

First, we wanted to make sure the Library is easier to access. For that, we have added keyboard shortcuts to quickly summon the Library from anywhere in the portal.

Try SHIFT+? to see a list of available shortcuts. There you’ll see you can bring up the Library by simply hitting SHIFT+L.

User set categories

A top request from users is to be able to create and manage categories in the Library. Now you can create a category on the spot! To do this, click on the top right Add Category icon on the Categorized Views screen.

You can also now rename categories using the triple-dot icon to the right of categories:

Content can be moved between categories by using drag-and-drop. You can auto-open categories using drag-hover, scrolling up and down when dragging a category above and below the fold.

Content that hasn’t been placed in a category will sit in the Uncategorized Views section of the main Library screen, waiting for you to find a new category home for them.

If shortcuts are your thing, we even added a very useful shortcut. When SHIFT-clicking on a category’s expand or collapse arrow, you will now be able to expand or collapse all categories in the Library screen.

Be more productive

Further study of some of our sample users’ portal behavior shows that workflows often gravitate around frequently eyeballing a discrete set of dashboards and saved views, so we’ve made improvements to help.

Favorites and recently viewed panes

The right side of the Library screen is now dedicated to two always-on Favorites and Recently Viewed panes.

You can favorite (or un-favorite via the star icon toggles) any dashboard or saved view from anywhere in Kentik Portal, whether from the Library or in the central content section. You can also favorite in the always-on panels and directly from dashboards and saved views.

Beyond that, you can also favorite Kentik Presets content from the second tab of the Library screen!

As you visualize more dashboards and saved views, your recently viewed items will stack up in the namesake Library panel.

Quicker access to Guided Mode dashboards

Guided Mode dashboards are a long-time favorite, and you can now directly input the pivot value from the Library screen.

The Guided Mode input will also be available directly from within both the Favorites and Recently Viewed panels.

Contextual actions galore

A handful of actions can now be taken directly from the Library entry of dashboards and saved views. These will reduce the number of clicks needed to visualize, and allow you to immediately select the necessary action:

If you are a My Kentik portal tenant, you can now directly export and add saved views to dashboards, clone, create subscriptions and even view directly. You too are one click away from the Library screen!

Custom HTTP Headers for v2 Webhook Notification

The custom webhook notification method in v2 notifications (/v4/settings/notifications) now supports the ability to customize the HTTP headers and values sent with the request, in addition to the request body.

Among other uses, this allows users to provide authorization credentials for API endpoints that require it.

Additional v2 Notification Methods

Notifications v2 now supports all of the notification methods that were supported in notifications v1, along with a few new ones like Microsoft Teams, VictorOps and xmatters.

In addition, with customizable HTTP headers and request body templates in the Custom Webhook method, it should now be possible to do one-off integrations with virtually any third party API.

NOTE: Some notification methods are not yet available to select as destinations for Synthetics notifications. Template updates are required for these methods to properly present the different data fields associated with Syn notifications.

v2 Notification Support for v4 DDoS Policies

v4 DDoS policies now support the selection of both v1 and v2 notification methods as destinations for alert notifications. In the thresholds section of the policy configuration, users will now see both v1 and v2 methods shown in the drop-down list.

Each available notification channel is labeled with the notification method type, though we do not distinguish between v1 and v2 types since these are not user-facing designations. We’ve also temporarily removed the link to the v1 notifications configuration page until we have migrated all v1 methods to v2.

Native v4 UI Forms for Mitigation Configuration

Mitigation platforms and methods are now configured via a native v4 UI form. The new form combines platform and method configuration onto a single page with a better UX that shows which methods are associated with each platform.

The new form also removes the limitation on configuring both RTBH and flowspec mitigation methods on the same router.

Ratio-based Thresholds

We’ve added an additional threshold type for DDoS policies, which allows the user to compare two different metrics that are measured by the policy. Along with this, we’ve added some additional metrics that measure separate inbound and outbound packets/sec and bits/sec rates. The metrics that are compared in a ratio-based threshold must be metrics that are configured as primary or secondary metrics for the policy.

Some use cases where ratio-based thresholds can be useful:

• DDoS policies: Comparing bits/sec in to bits/sec out can make it very easy to detect attacks for content / server destinations, since these resources almost always have a much greater traffic volume out than in. If this ratio reverses, it can be indicative of an attack and ratio-based detection doesn’t require knowledge of the actual traffic volumes.
• Peering policy violation: Many settlement-free peering agreements are based on exchanging traffic with the other party at 1:1 ratio. Setting a ratio-based threshold on a policy that looks at interface traffic in / out can detect possible violation of agreement terms by the other party.

Ratio-based policy thresholds allow the ratio to be compared in both directions (i.e. A:B and B:A) or one direction only. In the both directions case, an optional margin parameter effectively lets the user define a “band” of acceptable ratios, with values above or below the band triggering the threshold condition.

The months of August and September 2021 are synonymous of a large feature dump in the Cloud section ! While there's too much in it for a comprehensive summary, read the full details below to get your monthly fix of Cloud features.

Security Group & Network ACL Visibility in Kentik Map

Further burnishing our credentials as the cloud network engineers’ tool of choice for troubleshooting connectivity issues in AWS, we’ve just added a new sidebar feature to the Kentik Map, Security Groups & Network ACLs.

This sidebar enhancement enables network engineers to find traffic that is currently being dropped by AWS security groups or network ACLs applied to the selected VPC or subnet. The component analyzes the selected VPC or subnet for denied traffic into or out of the network environment and then crawls through the company’s AWS metadata to allow users to determine exactly what traffic has been dropped. The component also helps users understand which security group or network ACL policies caused the traffic to be dropped.

The system works by running a query of the flow logs to or from the selected VPC or subnet to find any traffic that had been marked by AWS as REJECTED. It then analyzes the direction of the traffic to provide an at-a-glance view of these traffic flows, as well as a convenient method for searching through the traffic to find a particular source or destination.

If a user wants to find more information about why particular traffic was dropped, they only need to click on the row to open an analysis window:

The system highlights rows that contributed to the specific traffic being dropped, making it easy to determine what policy needs to be updated and even which rule could be modified in order to rectify a misconfiguration.

Users can also view these access control policies directly from within the map — a very cumbersome task using only the AWS console and/or CLI. Kentik Cloud users now need only click on View Security Groups or View Network ACLs buttons in the sidebar and the system will open up a dialog showing exactly which policies are applied to the selected object and allow the user to browse the rules associated with each policy.

Support for New AWS Dimensions

Several months ago, AWS introduced support for the following dimensions in AWS flow logs:

• Source/Destination Packet Address: Network traffic is often encapsulated — think of NAT gateways and GRE. AWS surfaced this dimension to help users determine the original source or destination of traffic and gain a deeper understanding of how traffic flows through a cloud environment.
• Source/Destination AWS Service: Traces traffic to or from AWS services, even if the traffic is tunneled. This new dimension maps the traffic based on the packet address.
• Traffic Path: This dimension shows the path that egress traffic takes towards its destination.
• Flow Direction: Marks the direction of traffic from source to destination as ingress or egress.

ENI Tagging and Dimensions

Flows are generated from network interfaces that attach infrastructure to the network. In AWS parlance, these interfaces are called ENIs (elastic network interfaces). Mapping flows based on ENIs provides an opportunity to add new dimensions to group and filter by ENI type, as well as group or filter traffic by source and destination ENI. These new dimensions allow our users to construct super-precise flow queries that don’t double count traffic to or from instances, through gateway and load balancers as well as special infrastructure like Lambdas. This is an important advantage for Kentik Cloud users.

Cloud-Native Views for Kentik Map

We also created a more welcoming experience in the Kentik Map for cloud-native/cloud-only customers. Our previous version of the map assumed that users always had an on-prem network (or would soon be adding one). The result was that the cloud infrastructure was tucked away in the Cloud Block, while the large on-prem block remained a bare focal point on the map.

No longer! Now, when single cloud users without an on-prem network register their clouds in Kentik, the map will open up either directly in their cloud’s most appropriate view — and multi-cloud users without an on-prem network will be presented with a new multi-cloud view in the center of the map. If and when users decide to add on-prem network devices to Kentik, their experience will go back to what we are used to today (an on-prem centric view of the Kentik map).

Improvements in Sidebar Traffic Queries

Did you know that sites don’t need to be directly connected to each other in order to show traffic lines in the Kentik Map? Several quarters ago, we introduced a feature called “Draw Links Using…” which enabled users to select an option to draw links based on BGP Ultimate Exit as well as Site IP addresses configured in the site architecture dialog. This enables “island” networks (networks without a backbone) or SD-WAN networks to configure their sites and easily run traffic queries between sites.

These lines are drawn by queries using new dimensions called Source/Dest Site by IP and Site Type by IP. Because we’d heard that some new business was based on this, we’ve responded by adding these dimensions into the sidebar for convenient analysis in the map.

Another quick but important usability improvement was to create a new sidebar section titled “Details.” This prevents map objects (subnets, VPCs, gateways) with lots of metadata from making the sidebar unusable.

Azure Updates

A major improvement we’ve added for Azure is the ability for companies that centralize the collection of NSG flow logs into a single storage account to create “metadata-only” exports for resource groups within the same region. To make this work, simply disable the slider called “Enable Flow Logs for this Export” on any resource groups that don’t have their own storage account associated.

We’ve also implemented some improvements to our Azure services based on customer feedback as well as added infrastructure resiliency and backend code improvements. Stay tuned for more improvements this and next quarter as we continue to round out our cloud offerings.

New Cloud Tour in Demo Mode

We’ve added a sixth tour to Kentik’s Demo Mode, which walks users through a troubleshooting scenario involving connectivity problems between AWS resources and an on-premise database. The new tour highlights the difficulty of conducting this kind of troubleshooting in complex cloud environments with existing tools, and makes very clear Kentik’s strength in helping solve these issues.

New Weather Map

This month we are excited to announce beta availability for our new Weather Map — a new core feature of Kentik Maps.

Our new Weather Map shows network engineers how their network looks so that network architectures and the current traffic patterns can be understood at a glance. This feature was one of the most requested enhancements to Kentik Maps since we went live, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in terms of what we plan to do here.

Today, the Weather Map is simple. It renders a company’s sites over a geo-political map, using the customer’s configured site addresses to translate to latitude and longitude coordinates. We also cluster groups of sites within the same region to declutter the map; as users zoom towards these clusters, the cluster breaks open, revealing the sites positions on the map below. Between sites (and clusters) of sites, we’ll draw links using the connected interfaces so customers can view their backbone network utilization and click on links for easy traffic analysis.

We’ve got an amazing roadmap of features coming out for Kentik maps this quarter, so stay tuned for future updates to Weather Map, AWS map and site maps in Q4.

Historical Queries

Another great new feature enhancement is our ability to rewind the clock and show users how their AWS network (and associated traffic) looked in the past, using historical metadata.

When we launched the Kentik Map for AWS, we began with a metadata service that only stored metadata describing the current state of the user’s network. However, if a user adjusted the time window to find specific flows, we assumed that the AWS architecture was the same during the specified query window as it was when the query was actually run. We knew this would eventually require historical support, which took time to design and implement.

However, that day is here! Users can change the to/from dates in the Kentik Map and we will update the map to show the user what the environment looked like during that time. If we took multiple “snapshots” of metadata during the specified time, we will show the most current we have for the time window.

This means that if traffic used to flow through a gateway that was subsequently deleted, we’ll show that gateway on the map. If traffic entered a subnet that only existed for a day or an hour — we’ll draw that subnet on the map.

Clickable Lines in the Kentik Map for AWS

We’ve added the ability to click on a line within AWS and get instantaneous traffic details for the line! In prior versions of the Map for AWS, users could only click on Map elements such as Subnets, Gateways, etc. Understanding and analyzing traffic between elements was left as an exercise for the user to construct queries using the Data Explorer. Now users can click on lines between subnets (“Show Connections”), lines between gateways, and lines to and from internet ASNs.

NAT Gateways and Transit Gateways

We also improved upon the way that the Kentik Map rendered traffic to and from gateway objects. Previous versions of the Kentik Map couldn’t determine the amount of traffic entering a subnet from a gateway. Now that we’ve switched our flow enrichment over to using network interfaces rather than only IP addresses, we can indeed show traffic from this infrastructure entering your customer’s environments.

Lots of additions in August and September 2021 in the Synthetic Monitoring department.
Almost every area of the product got new additions: from additional test frequencies (sub-second for the win !) to Page Load Test enhancements to Synthetic Test based dashboards, there's a lot for everyone, see for yourself !

More Test Frequency Options

We now offer more test frequency options. We have added 2 minute, 10 minute, 15 minute and 30 minute options to the existing (1 second, 15 second, 1 minute and 5 minute) options when configuring tests.

Ignore TLS Option

Network teams told us that they often don’t care about catching bad certificate issues and would rather “bypass” these failures to continue testing network performance. To achieve this, we have added support for ignoring TLS errors and exposed the option to configure this through the advanced settings for HTTP/API test types and Page Load test types.

Standard Deviation-based Custom Thresholds

Previously, custom test thresholds were based on static values only. While this worked well on the surface, static thresholds are limited in practical use. Specifically, static thresholds cannot be used in mesh-type tests because each pair of agents would likely need a different value. Similarly, with multi-agent tests to a single target, if the agents are in different geographic locations, the expected latency for each is different, and it isn’t possible to specify a single value that satisfies them all. For all those reasons, we have added the option to specify thresholds for latency (including HTTP latency and DNS resolution time) and jitter that are based on a multiple of the baseline measurement.

By default, the new algorithm computes a baseline for latency and jitter measurements. It uses that to determine whether to mark a particular measurement as a warning (if it is more than 1.5x the baseline) or critical (if it is more than 3x the baseline). Similarly, for packet loss we default to warning when there is any packet loss (that is >0%) and to critical if it is higher than 50%.

DNS Performance Dashboard Preset Tab

To build on our commitment to include tests to common infrastructure services that network teams rely on, we now include a new DNS Performance tab as a preset on the Synthetics Performance Dashboard.

This tab is built using the “DNS density grid” type of synthetic dashboard and features availability and uptime checks to 7 of the top/common DNS service providers from 15 geographically distributed global agents. Where available, two IPv4 and two IPv6 DNS servers are tested for each service. This allows customers to quickly rule out (or in) any DNS failures they see from “general issues” with the specific provider.

SaaS Performance Tab Migrated to HTTP GETs

The SaaS Performance tab on the performance dashboard was the very first preset tab when we launched Synthetics back in October 2020. At that time, this was a basic “hostname” test which is essentially just a ping and trace. Since then we have introduced much better tests that are capable of testing both HTTP layer and network layer performance, so in the spirit of “upgrading” to the latest, we have migrated all our existing SaaS performance tests to the HTTP or API test type.

Page Load Asset Validation

Our browser Page Load tests (only supported on app agents) are enhanced with “Asset Validation.”

• Users have the option of specifying one or more CSS selectors during the test configuration.

• The agent/test will look for those CSS selectors in the web page assets that it loads as part of the tests and if it finds them all it will indicate a PASS, but even if one of them isn’t present in the results, it will return a FAIL. Note that as with other results in the table, a grey color indicates that this metric is not used in computing test health (which ultimately drives alerts and notifications).

• To figure out how many loaded, and which selectors did not load at what points of time, the user can click through the “View Details” button to see a time-series chart. It shows the total returned selectors relative to the total configured, and by hovering over the chart, shows which ones were found and which were not found.

Dashboard Widgets for Aggregated Test Results

One of the common use cases for Synthetics is to benchmark one’s own performance against competitors as well as to compare and contrast one’s services’ performance from different parts of the world. Customers will often configure multiple tests (one set for their services and one for competitors, or tests in different parts of the world, labeled by regions) and will want to see an aggregated view. To help, we are leveraging the Kentik dashboards (Library).

There are two possible widget types:

• Table view: Great for comparing the performance of your service between different regions of the world from where your users may be accessing the service
• Gauge view: Great for comparing the overall average performance of your service (globally) relative to that of one or more of your competitors

When creating a custom dashboard widget with Synthetic data, users now have the option to choose a “Panel Type,” which may be either “Single Test” (the existing type) or the new “Multiple Test” type, which aggregates data across multiple tests. When the “Multiple Test” option is selected, the user has the option to specify the “Test Type,” “Display Type” and “Metric” that they want to aggregate data on. Optionally they can also specify agent labels that will be used to group results by in the table.

Results are displayed either as a table with each row showing aggregated values for the selected metric grouped by agent labels (user configurable).

Or as gauges showing the average metric:

These widgets can be combined with the existing widget types to produce some useful dashboards.

Notifications for BGP Monitor

We now have notifications available for BGP tests via email and other notification channels.

The Hybrid Cloud observability feature set in Kentik Portal makes a big leap forward these June and July months, with a special focus on Amazon Web Services features, read on !

AWS Entity Explorer

A quiet but mighty addition to our product, the AWS Entity Explorer puts important network metadata at our user’s fingertips. You might not know it, but the details that dictate how cloud networks behave are buried behind APIs or inside cloud interfaces — which were built for automated consumption — and certainly not for solving problems for network engineers. With this new feature, engineers can answer questions like “What VPC is this internet gateway associated with?”

Features include:

• Instantly find any network element using our quick search utility. Search on owner IDs, entity IDs, tags, and names.
• Jump from gateways to attached VPCs to quickly navigate around complex metadata.
• Our new “Open in Map” feature allows users to quickly locate and understand how infrastructure is placed within their environment.
• Open cloud networks elements in Quick Views and Data Explorer.

Support for Peered Transit Gateway Traffic Queries

The Transit Gateway in AWS continues to stymie network engineers trying to get a handle on how their traffic is routed within their AWS cloud network. Our original implementation of TGW support only looked at traffic that had originated on a directly-attached VPC. However, Transit Gateways can be peered with each other — meaning that a single Transit Gateway can actually be forwarding traffic to or from an adjacent Transit Gateway. Being that we are awesome, and because we are the only network observability company with a solution to monitor traffic through Transit Gateways, we solved this problem by writing an algorithm that discovers peered Transit Gateways — so you can always see the correct amount of traffic flowing to or though your TGWs.

AWS “Show Path” Feature

A truly kick-ass, differentiating feature for Kentik Cloud. Understanding how traffic flows from one VPC to another over a cloud network is truly a painful experience — one that has network engineers switching back and forth between their command lines and the AWS console for minutes before arriving at a simple answer. The AWS Show Path feature eliminates this pain and replaces it with an intuitive, complete and beautiful way to see paths between sources and destinations in the cloud.

Show Path works across peering connections, transit gateways, over direct-connects and site-to-site VPNs and also works locally, within a VPC. The feature elegantly handles default and covering routes by suggesting specific routes from adjacent devices ensuring that the path drawn is as complete as possible.

AWS Configuration Status

One thing that has become clear over the last few months is that we need to continue to strengthen our ability to quickly and easily onboard AWS flow logs and metadata. However, with the multitude of architectures we support and data + flow logs coming in from tens or sometimes hundreds of different sources per customer, we never had a way to concisely convey the health of a customer’s Kentik implementation… until today.

The AWS Configuration Status page aims to make this easier by helping users get an at-a-glance overview of how complete (or incomplete) a customer’s AWS/Kentik configuration is. For each region that a customer has configured an export for, we extract the account ID, and display a high-level overview of the API and Flow status. Clicking on a row allows customers to get more details such as a listing of exactly which APIs our system requires and a success state for each. Warning messages are detailed and complete on the mouseover. Below the APIs, we enumerate the flow logs configured for each entity within a given account/region and flag any accounts that don’t appear to have flow logs configured such that Kentik could ingest them.

Search Feature for Kentik Map + Performance Monitor

Building a map for large customers with hundreds or thousands of accounts is definitely possible, but doesn’t always result in the most useful of visualizations. That’s why we added a search and filtering feature to both the Kentik Map and the Performance Monitor. This feature allows users to quickly find ‘needle in the haystack’ entities like VPCs, subnets, and gateways. Our search intelligently recognizes the format of each search string entered and builds a complex search query that can be saved for quick reuse.

Support for External ID

At the request of one of our customers, we’ve added support for External IDs in the API and S3 calls that we initiate to AWS. External ID helps protect our customers from “Confused Deputy” attacks that could allow our service to be abused by malicious 3rd parties to attack our customers. (We don’t believe that the access we request could ever be used in such a way, but better safe than sorry!) As this feature has become more front-and-center in AWS’ role configuration dialogs, we are glad to support this enhancement. The feature now injects a unique string per customer with each request that we send to AWS. This string is set to be the Kentik customer CID.

New App Agents

We released a new set of agents that will enable tests at the application layer. These are what we’re calling “App Agents” and they are capable of running a full headless Chrome browser instance. These agents will enable us to offer our customers tests like Page Load tests and Transaction tests. When used in conjunction with our rich network layer functionality, these new agents and test types will allow network engineering and network operations teams to quickly determine if the issue is at the network layer or at the application layer.

Full Browser Page Load Test

We activated the Page Load Test type that performs a full browser page load using the new App agents.

• The new test type can be set up by clicking “Page Load” under “Web Tests”
• Agent selection uses the new App agents but this is seamless to the end user.
  • Once in the test setup, clicking the “edit agents” button will only display the App agents in the list (that is currently a subset of all locations but growing to include all currently supported locations).
• The test set up is similar to the HTTP or API test except:
  • It performs a full browser page load (while the HTTP test stops after the page contents are retrieved using a GET)
  • Only includes GET option (since it is a page load). Does not include ping and trace alongside the page load (we have plans to support that in the future).
• The results are presented in a similar fashion to the HTTP or API test, with the following differences:
  • Table columns include new “DOM Processing Time” and “Navigation & App Cache” that are specifically relevant to the time taken for the browser to load and display the contents of the page respectively

BGP Route Viewer

BGP Route viewer is the first of a series of capabilities planned to help proactively monitor BGP-related conditions that can impact performance. In response to customer requests and feedback, we have developed a comprehensive roadmap for BGP monitoring, and we believe our solution will have significant performance advantages over alternative solutions.

The first part of Kentik’s solution is BGP Route Viewer. BGP Router Viewer appears as a tab along with the existing SaaS and Cloud Performance tabs. For customers who have entered prefixes in their Network Classification settings, we will automatically load BGP update data for those prefixes in this tab. For customers who have not entered any prefixes in their Network Classification settings, we will show an interface that allows you to do so and give you the option to save the entered prefixes to the Network Classifications page.

HTTP Stage Timing and Charts

With the new Page Load tests, results can be plotted in a time series along with HTTP stages and the timing for each stage. This new view helps network teams isolate network layer issues from HTTP layer issues.

Major Path UX Overhaul

The (traceroute driven) path experience has been one of the most valued features of Synthetics and while it works well, we felt like we could go back and revisit the design holistically after having added a bunch of small and big features iteratively since it first launched (back in November). The updates we made can be summarized in two main buckets:

1. Improve the overall usability of the product/feature by:
   • Reducing the number of clicks to do things (like setting the thresholds and other config knobs)
   • Reducing the quantity of information presented on default load (intelligently collapsing things to reduce information overload)
   • Reducing the amount of whitespace used so it is more compact and requires less or no scrolling
   • Preventing the path from exceeding the bounds of the page
   • Avoiding the side pane (which required knowing that one should click and would cover a third of the path when open)
   • Remove the ping-driven health timeline, as this data does not necessarily correlate with latency seen on the path and can lead to confusion.
2. Support collapse/group by sites. This has been requested by a few customers, particularly ones that run tests within their own network and find the ASN option of less use (everything collapsed into their ASN). Having the ability to group by sites lets these customers know if a path change caused traffic to go through a different site instead of the expected/desired one.

Here is a list of the main changes:

• 
• Health timeline is removed from path tab. It was ping-results driven and could confuse users when it showed issues, but no issues were present in the path. (The path is trace-probe driven, which may not show the same issues for short-lived spikes.)
• 
• All group/collapse functions (ASN, left/right) have been rolled into one main “Group by” selector and the option to group by “Sites” has been added.
• Copy for geodistance-based latency comparison has been improved and helper text/icon added.
• Option to “Reset” everything back to default quickly has been added.
• 
• The ASN legend has been moved below the path UI and is displayed in a line, moving the path higher up in the page and reducing the amount of whitespace.
  
• The main path trace visualization has received the most significant overhaul and results in a much less overwhelming and much more fluid experience than before. Highlights include:
  • 
  • Extra effort has been put into avoiding overlapping traces that cross other traces and make the overall UI very busy and confusing.
  • You can hover over any node (without needing to click) and it will show you all the information available.
    
  • Similar to the node hover, hovering over an agent (source) or target will show you all the information cleanly organized in sections, and will give you a link to view the raw traceroute output. There is also an option to quickly collapse nodes for this or other agents with just one click, right there.
  • 
  • Previously we would only show latency for (red) links that exceeded the threshold and packet loss for (red) nodes that exceeded that threshold. Now this information is shown for all nodes and links. In cases where the metrics exceed the threshold, a red font is used to highlight. Further, previously high packet loss nodes were identified with a full red circle, which was confusing if there was an ASN with a similar color. Now this is made clearer with a red border.
    
  • 

Density Grid Groups Dashboard

In response to customer feedback, we have added a new type of visualization option under Synthetics in the dashboards (library) portion of the product. One of the key use cases is customers who set up DNS servers by zones and want to see a global view of the performance of their whole DNS infrastructure.

• Select “Add” a “Synthetics Test View” dashboard element and then pick the new “Density Grid Group” allows you to multi-select any tests configured in the system that are of type “DNS Grid” or “Network Grid.”
• Select a few tests and save the widget to display agents in the first column and then test results aggregated by target in the columns to the right of that.
• For each cell in the results, each square represents that specific agent hitting one DNS server to resolve the specific target.
• A holistic view lets the user quickly pinpoint any issues from a large number of DNS servers distributed across the world.
  

9 New LATAM Global Agents

We deployed nine new global agents throughout LATAM, improving our coverage in the region and increasing count from four agents to thirteen.

What Makes Kentik Cloud Different?

Kentik Cloud provides enterprises with the ability to observe their public and hybrid cloud environments and understand how cloud networks impact user experience, application performance, costs, and security. By showing a unified end-to-end network view to, from, and across public clouds, the internet, and on-premises infrastructures, Kentik Cloud helps network engineers to quickly solve problems and dramatically improve their cloud networks. Networking teams that use Kentik Cloud will love the rich visualizations, lightning-quick speed, and thoughtful workflows that illuminate the paths, performance, traffic, and inter-connectivity that comprise their cloud networks.

The solution introduces several new exciting features and capabilities.

Observation Deck™

The Observation Deck™ was built on the idea that customers often use Kentik to build dashboards that meaningfully represent the infrastructure and use cases most relevant to them and then switch back and forth between these views and the Kentik workflows they love. The Observation Deck allows people to choose their favorite Kentik components (which are pre-built as “widgets”) and places them side-by-side with their custom views, including their Data Explorer, dashboards, etc. This puts the information our customers need front-and-center.

Although officially part of the Kentik Cloud release, the Observation Deck isn’t limited to only our cloud subscribers — everyone using our platform will be able to enjoy it. Cheers!

Kentik Map Enhancements for Cloud

The Kentik Map is all about helping users ask and answer questions about their data in the context of their architectures. These latest enhancements truly deliver on this promise for cloud users by highlighting the most important elements that cloud networkers care about — the data paths, gateways, route tables, traffic data — and the metadata that puts this all into perspective — in one single, easy-to-use, and beautiful interface. People can use the map to discover misrouted, rejected, or unwanted traffic patterns. Using the map to understand the flow of traffic around your cloud environment is so easy that you’ll never want to use your cloud console again. Best of all, the map is integrated with your on-prem data so you can now enjoy a complete and seamless experience as you troubleshoot issues in your data center through to your VPC architectures.

Cloud Performance Monitor

Cloud Performance Monitor extends the power of Kentik Synthetics by helping cloud users understand the paths that traffic is taking through their network so they can set up our synthetics agents in the most appropriate places. The workflow is broken down into two components.

The Interconnects tab helps users gain a complete picture of how their data flows across the critical infrastructure “gluing” their cloud environment to their data centers and remote offices. The Conversations tab uses flow data to identify the inter-VPC communication paths inside cloud environments so that users can pinpoint the parts of their network that would readily benefit from active performance monitoring. Without Kentik Cloud, understanding these architectures and finding these traffic patterns can be difficult, making performance monitoring challenging. With Kentik Cloud, it’s a breeze; just point, click, and register a synthetic agent in seconds.

Automated Configuration and Onboarding Improvements

This release of Kentik Cloud also features several small but mighty enhancements that we’re proud to share with you.

First, we’ve dramatically improved our onboarding experience by giving users two paths to get up and running on Kentik Cloud — an automated path based on Terraform, and a manual path with easy validation. The Terraform path builds a Terraform configuration template based on user preferences, making it simple to configure your AWS environment in seconds. The generated configuration relies on the popular AWS Terraform provider to enable flow logs on your VPCs, configure the collection buckets and required access policies. Then, the configuration uses our brand new Kentik Terraform provider to automatically register each VPC from every monitored account in the Kentik platform.

Our manual onboarding improvements are real time-savers as well. In previous setup screens for AWS, we asked users to input role ARNS, buckets, and regions before providing any kind of attempt to validate our success in being able to ingest cloud flow logs. The result was that users who had a misconfiguration weren’t sure what to fix. We’ve improved this experience by adding validation buttons for each step along the way.

New Data Explorer Dimensions

We’ve also added a few new dimensions to the Data Explorer that are super useful for AWS users.

Packet Address: AWS recently added the ability to see inside network overlays (GRE, etc.) to the raw source and destination IP addresses in your VPCs. This is useful when you’re troubleshooting transit gateway Connect attachments, NAT gateways, or any kind of traffic with unencrypted overlays. Gateway ID/Gateway Type: This is one of our most exciting AWS data dimensions, allowing you to see exactly what traffic crossed various gateways. This is useful when you’re trying to understand how traffic is flowing through your network, or are working to implement new gateways or retire old ones.

Forwarding State: This dimension enriches flow records with the route state of the destination prefix. If traffic is flowing towards a route with an active route, the forwarding state will be marked as “active.” However, if traffic is destined towards a blackhole route, the state will reflect this with a value of “blackholed.”

Kentik Cloud Availability and Next Steps

The Kentik Cloud capabilities described above are available today as part of both Kentik Editions. Cloud Cost Explorer, which is described in the press release and in Solutions: Clouds & Hybrid is planned for future availability.

In addition to polishing what we’ve already started, we’ve got so much more exciting work planned over the next few quarters: connectivity troubleshooting workflows, new cloud widgets, map enhancements, and support for new authentication features in AWS. We’re also excited to extend capabilities in our maps to Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud in the coming quarters. Stay tuned!

Our Connectivity Cost workflow is enhanced and now available!

We are excited to announce both a complete redesign and enhancements for our Connectivity Cost workflow. The new and advanced capabilities make managing and optimizing connectivity costs a cinch. All tedious work done manually to calculate connectivity cost extracting and munging data points from different silos into endless spreadsheets is now gone. You are most welcome.

You can now routinely and timely answer analytical interconnection decision-making questions, such as:

• How does our overall transit cost compare to our peering costs?
• Is it worth it to pay for this specific local provider vs. the current transit upstream?
• Cost-wise, how do these two transit providers compare? Should one be canceled? Or added?
• How have my costs evolved for this provider over the past X months?

Be ready to negotiate and optimize connectivity cost at any time with Kentik’s Connectivity Cost workflow.

What Makes Connectivity Cost Different?

Our Connectivity Cost workflow enables efficient management and planning of connectivity spending per Mbps across connectivity type, provider, and point of presence (POP)/sites. Kentik customers can now effortlessly observe cost evolution, in any currency, against strategic goals, and act timely to implement more cost-efficient connectivity agreements.

See the newly enhanced capabilities in the following sections.

Manage Connectivity Cost from Provider, Connectivity Type, and Site Perspectives

Get provider costs broken down by provider, connectivity type, or sites to track and optimize your cost per Mbps. Efficiently consolidate invoices and instrument contract negotiations with an understanding of current and historical data.

The below screengrab illustrates Kentik’s Connectivity Cost workflow providing total monthly spend and cost per Mbps benchmark metrics.

Automate Cost Calculation

Get provider costs applied to your network traffic volume automatically and monitor your monthly spending.

With the enhancements in our Connectivity Cost workflow, contract pricing data (typically kept in forms in the legal department and used in manual cost analysis) is now part of a streamlined process that automatically applies pricing to the interface traffic for cost calculations. All popular computation methods, including flat, committed, with or without tiers, and configurable percentile, are supported out-of-the-box. We understand that pricing agreements can have unique conditions that are hardwired in generic formulas, so the enhanced workflow also offers flexibility to accommodate custom pricing items, as “additional charges,” at contract or interface level (handy for cross-connect costs).

In Kentik style, calculations complexities are handled behind the scenes and your own unique cost items are accommodated as well. It is the end of time-consuming toil and out-of-band adjustments; all is done in one automated workflow.

See the image below:

Handle Global Connectivity and Currencies Fluctuations

The Connectivity Cost workflow also supports cost models of local contracts in different currencies and the dynamics of exchange rates. Bandwidth procured in bulk is sensitive to exchange-rate variations, adding another layer of complexity to cost tracking. Kentik makes it completely transparent by embedding exchange rate into daily calculations, ensuring that cost estimates for the ongoing month, as well as cost history for the past months, will always:

• Allow financial planning to consolidate all cost metrics in a single currency, and
• Keep both current month estimates and historical data truthful to the exchange rates when they are computed.

As shown below, Kentik’s Connectivity Costs workflow now natively addresses multi-currencies:

Optimize Connectivity Cost and Cross-functional Work

Connectivity costs are metrics consumed by teams other than network operations and data is rarely easy to ingest and parse for the non-technical crowd (whether the underlying cost models or the actual metrics).

With our workflow, multiple audiences and teams can now easily track and optimize your cost per Mbps, consolidate invoices, and instrument contract negotiations. Provider costs are automatically applied to network traffic volume and visualized in intuitive dashboards broken down by provider, connectivity type, or sites.

The Future of Connectivity Cost Management is Bright

Let’s say your teams are now reaping the benefits of the Connectivity Costs workflows. Connectivity costs are reviewed regularly, with goals set and tracked.

Think about this: These interconnection cost models are now available to the rest of Kentik workflows. The future is quite bright. All the necessary ingredients are now in place to be able to compute the cost of any slice of traffic coming in or out of your network: It can be different services that you run or offer; it can be other classes of users or customers that you identify with your Custom Dimensions logic; or even any CDN, OTT traffic, etc.

Be sure to check out our Connectivity Cost workflow and see how easy it is to stay on top of connectivity spending and capitalize on optimization opportunities.

A Better Look at Network Observability

With the rapid development of cloud networking, some traditional ways of visualizing the network are under strain. It’s getting difficult to see where problems arise and drill into them on network maps designed around old low-density, device-based topologies. To make networks more observable, Kentik has been hard at work on a new visualization, optimized for emerging high-density, hybrid- and multi-cloud networks.

Meet Kentik’s “Mesh” Visualization

A mesh visualization is what it sounds like: a mesh or a matrix of network tests and traffic representing all possible connections between a set of test-points and end-points. Each “cell” in the mesh provides data on test results, traffic, or health status. Like looking at a spreadsheet, you can quickly associate any cell with the network endpoints by looking at the row and column headings. Using this visualization, you can get a lot of information into a single view and make that intuitive.

This month, Kentik is introducing important new features to the mesh visualization. Here’s a summary of the top new items:

• Better support for very large meshes with scroll bars and performance enhancements
• Easier-to-read headings or names on the “rows” and “columns”
• A clearer depiction of the time-range
• Improved presentation of data when hovering over individual cells
• Ability to clone a mesh to get a good starting point for customizations

Even Better Together with Flow Data

The mesh test results make it easy to see when there’s a problem, but your next thought goes to “is there any impact on traffic?” The last thing you want to do at this point is jump over to another tool to get the answer. Now Kentik makes it easy to see real traffic time-series charts alongside synthetics metrics in the test details by leveraging the site IP configuration information.

Use Cases

There are many ways to use Kentik’s mesh tests in practice. Here are a couple of common use cases:

• Migrate to or Between Clouds with Confidence

With the new mesh test compare network performance of applications or services running in the cloud versus in data centers or between different cloud regions and availability zones so as to determine the best migration strategy.

• Monitor DC-to-DC or Intra-DC Connectivity

Create complex bi-directional site-mesh tests to test connectivity between data centers or within points of a data center easily, and view results holistically.

In Summary

As cloud networking adoption grows, we need new innovative ways to visualize network test results and understand performance metrics in terms of real traffic data. Answering any question about the network means intuitive visualizations and the ability to look at and correlate network telemetry data quickly. Kentik is leading the charge with the new mesh test view and the integration of real traffic information.

For more detailed information about this and many other recent Kentik product improvements, see our February product update.