Latest features, improvements, and product updates on Kentik's Network Observability platform.
The mitigations UI/UX experience has been updated this December, these few changes are the initial steps towards a much longer Q1 2022 Alerting and Mitigation push, stay tuned for more.
As usual, our Cloud Product team turned around a ton of great enhancements to the Kentik Cloud and Map products over the month of December 2021. More than ever, Kentik goes one step closer from being the only and most complete Hybrid Cloud observability solution out there. See for yourself.
This month saw one of the largest updates to the Weather Map yet. In this release we’ve incorporated several new features worth discussing. We added layers that allow users to view utilization and/or health data into their map, along with a nifty layer selector:
A major use case for Weather Map in ISPs and large backbone networks is to assist users in performing capacity planning exercises. In order to accomplish this, we needed to color the map based on interface utilization rather than total bytes. This means that our new map breaks down the interface utilization of a single interface or an aggregated bundle and buckets these interfaces into 10 groups of increasing utilization.
We also needed to add in support for interface bundling as well as support visually aggregated interfaces when more than one link connects a site cluster to another site or another cluster. To support this, we use the backend attributes that we poll from our customer’s SNMP data to determine if an interface is configured as part of a bundle or is operating as a single interface.
If a link is drawn between two site clusters, we’ll aggregate the bandwidth over both links and calculate the total utilization on the fly:
When a user clicks on this link, the system allows them to choose which link they’d like to focus on:
We’ve also added in sidebar improvements that make selections of Sites and Links easier. Consider the following example. A user has clicked on the 3 site cluster in the Chicago region on the Kentik map:
The sidebar now opens up with a running count of the sites and links interconnecting the sites.
Expanding these elements allows to interactively browse the map:
We have also started to resurface health on the Weather Map. We started by adding health into the cluster popovers as such:
Of course, we also show the site health on the canvas and sidebar as well. Here we see an unhealthy ORD1 site on the canvas:
And a list of all of the sites within a view color-coded by health in the sidebar:
You will notice that we also now color links by health. We currently have two link-health states — down and degraded:
Down indicates that the router that originates or terminates a link has reported an ifOperStatus of DOWN or administratively shut down, while Degraded state means that the system is reporting errors.
A popular request we’ve heard is to show a user’s site topology without having to load the entire site view. We now show the site topology in the sidebar itself. This is useful for getting at-a-glance understandings of how sites are constructed and is a step closer to our next iteration which allows users to see the devices that connect to other sites directly on the Weather Map canvas.
This December, a few top demands make it to the synthetics product area, amongst others:
You are now able to run ping and traceroute on the App Agents. As a first step in the rollout, we have enabled UI changes to be able to run this as part of the Page Load test (the only test that uses the App Agents today).
Based on feedback from certain customers we realized that the BGP test results were noisy and it was hard to get a high level view of the number of changes and prefixes involved before digging into the details. We have made three changes to address this:
When we added support for alerts and notifications in Synthetics about a year ago, we supported Slack, email and JSON/webhook. We did the work necessary to support and template all the other notification types and have exposed them in the UI.
This month the cloud product team delivered a ton of improvements: tightening up our maps, making our backend systems more resilient, and improving Azure onboarding. We released an alpha version of Kentik Kube, a product designed to help networkers awash in a sea of containers find solid ground, a variety of map improvements, support for VPC endpoint interfaces and gateways, and the ability to retain VPC Flow Logs inside of S3 buckets indefinitely. And we delivered the first of two projects designed to make agentless cloud ingest a reality. We are actively seeking design partners for Kentik Kube. Please contact us if you’d like to help guide our vision for this product early on. We welcome your input! Read on for all the details.
One thing we believe at Kentik is that everything that runs over the network should be observable — from containers to clouds, and everything in between. And with that in mind, whenever we become aware of a new visibility gap making operators’ lives more difficult, we aim to bridge it.
Enter Kubernetes. In 2020, we released an agent that could be used to export network flows from Kubernetes. And this month, we’ve released Kentik Kube to visualize this data.
Kentik Kube is a new module of the Kentik Network Observability Cloud that helps cloud and infrastructure engineers gain detailed network traffic and performance visibility both inside and among their Kubernetes clusters to quickly detect and solve network problems.
As the industry has adopted Kubernetes as a de facto standard for workload scheduling, teams that support these environments are discovering that their network and Kubernetes monitoring tools can’t help them answer critical questions because they:
We built Kentik Kube to provide this visibility for these teams. Our solution supports cloud-managed Kubernetes clusters (AKS, EKS, and GKS) and on-prem, self-managed clusters using the most widely used cloud implemented network models.
Kentik Kube helps by supporting the following use cases:
Network performance: Discover which services and pods are experiencing network delays so you can troubleshoot and fix problems faster. Identify service misconfigurations without capturing packets. Configure alert policies to proactively find high latency impacting nodes, pods, workloads or services.
Top talkers: Identify clients/requesters consuming your Kubernetes services so you can track down problematic connections. Discover oversubscribed microservices so you can adjust scaling, configure node affinity, etc. Know exactly who was talking to which pod, and when.
Policy validation: Ensure that your network reality matches your design. See which pods, namespaces and services are speaking with each other to ensure that your configured policy is working as expected.
Total infrastructure visualization: Know which pods are deployed on which nodes — even historically. See which pods and services are communicating with non-Kubernetes infrastructure or the internet. View your network from container to cloud.
Kentik has always allowed our AWS customers to retain their flow logs in their buckets. However, we ran into problems with customers who wanted to keep their flow logs around for long periods of time. We’ve made some significant changes and are happy to report that customers can now keep their flows around as long as they like — without any adverse effects on their Kentik subscriptions.
This month we’ve begun our journey towards full support of VPC endpoints in Kentik Cloud. Our first volley of product improvements includes giving customers the ability to group and filter flows based on these gateway IDs in the Data Explorer.
We support both Gateway-style VPC Endpoints as well as Interface VPC endpoints (AWS PrivateLink). However, despite their similar names, these are very different things under the hood. VPC Endpoint Gateways act as gateways to Amazon services, keeping this traffic inside your VPC and off the public internet. Using these endpoints can save money by keeping VPC network egress costs down — making identifying when traffic isn’t using these gateways a key use case. These gateways aren’t exposed as elastic network interfaces and thus can be difficult to track traffic using other network solutions. Kentik is the only solution on the market that gives you this capability.
AWS PrivateLink allows AWS and their customers to configure their services for consumption without forcing traffic to flow over the public internet. Over 128 different AWS services are available behind these so-called “interface endpoints” while just a small few are available behind VPC endpoint gateways. Interface Endpoints serve to reduce cost and can serve a security function in that sensitive information can be shared between AWS customers privately. These endpoints are exposed in a more standard fashion inside of VPCs using Elastic Network Interfaces as the gateways. The major difference in how this impacts Kentik users is that these interfaces are grouped in the Interface Type dimensions and specific interfaces are identified in the ENI ID dimension while the Gateway-style endpoints are grouped into the Gateway Type dimensions and the specifics are found under Gateway ID dimension.
We took a major step forward this month in our promise to offer agentless ingest to AWS customers. Instead of having Kentik reach into customer buckets to retrieve flow logs, we can now support customers who wish to write their flow logs directly into an S3 bucket that Kentik manages and maintains. This allows customers to write flow logs more flexibly (via direct VPC write, lambda copies, S3 actions, etc.) and also allows customers to avoid giving Kentik permissions into their S3 buckets. Next up on our agentless agenda is to provide a method for companies to post their metadata to a similar endpoint for enrichment and mapping visualizations. Stay tuned!
Following our September release of the Weather Map, we’ve continued to iterate on our Kentik Maps product. This month we’ve added a bunch of important fixes and improvements.
We’ve improved handling overlapping lines in AWS. Previous versions of Kentik Map would allow lines connecting close together objects to overlap. We’ve added some logic to detect this condition and give these objects a bit of breathing room, making it easier to visually determine the path connecting the objects and select them with your mouse.
We’ve improved visualizing site-to-site VPN connections. Prior versions of Kentik Map for AWS kept the customer gateways in the middle of the screen. We moved customer gateways into the “On Prem” box where they rightfully belonged. This helps clean up the interconnection section of the map considerably. We have more work coming here this quarter to make the map experience even easier to use for companies with lots of interconnections.
We’ve added optional RPKI validation to the BGP Monitor test. When enabled (also the default) we will query the RPKI database and report the RPKI status in the result set.
The Actions menu in both Dashboards and Saved View now contains all the actions that Data Explorer would offer in this menu. This has been a long time requirement from our customers and we are happy to get this delivered.
Additional features include:
The Edge > Connectivity Costs workflow supports history.
While only details for the ongoing month were previously visible in the Connectivity Cost UI, the new release will allow users to navigate cost details month-by-month.
Pictures being worth a thousand words, see for yourself in the screenshots below ! Also you can take a look at our KB article on the Connectivity Costs workflow.
In the back scenes, Kentik's OTT Service Tracking workflow leverages an engine, aptly named True Origin. This engine correlates DNS Query/Response data with network telemetry to provide a scalable, affordable DPI-lite type of service.
You can learn more about it here.
While this is something that we rarely spend time talking about, our OTT detection engine, a broadband provider’s favorite, keeps on learning and evolving as time goes by, and the amount of DNS hostname patterns that it is able to detect the underlying service for keeps on increasing constantly.
Over the month of October 2021, the True Origin engine has learned to classify an additional ~1,000 new hostname patterns to match flow with DNS queries. This month, its improvements were centered around Vietnam, Denmark, Sweden and Germany.
As one of our customers’ go-to modules in Kentik Portal, the Library was due for a facelift. Some of Kentik’s customers have as many as 500 dashboards and saved views. We decided to make improvements to handle large numbers of dashboards and saved views.
See the product update that details the highlights of this new version.
Some of these include:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!