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.

Insights are a unique feature provided by Kentik. They are autonomous notices that tell you about interesting or anomalous behaviors. Insights can be any fact that is relevant to the traffic at which you are looking. Insights help you quickly recognize where there might be a problem that requires your attention.
This February 2021, we're making Kentik Insights even more powerful.

New Comparison Insights

We are releasing a number of new comparison insights for Cloud, Edge, and Service Provider dimensions. These have been introduced in conjunction with the comparison threshold improvements (explained below). Please also see the Knowledge Base documentation.

Edge Traffic Comparison

Cloud Traffic Comparison

Service Provider Analytics Traffic Comparison

With February 2021 comes another heavy load of new Synthetic Monitoring feature additions: Synthetics Dashboard Widgets, more functionality for Mesh tests, we're now surfacing related Network Flow data within Synthetic test results, as well as many more general point improvements. See for yourself.

Dashboard Widgets and My Kentik Portal Support

Kentik customers now have the option of adding synthetics test results as widgets to their Kentik dashboards and then sharing those widgets with their customers (tenants) via My Kentik Portal. Custom dashboards also let you visualize real traffic charts alongside synthetic test results to help you easily correlate test failures with changes in real traffic patterns.

• Editing any existing dashboard will show users an option to add “Synthetic Test View.”
• Clicking Add will show a modal that allows users to select a synthetic test from the list of tests configured in the account.
• If the selected test happens to be a mesh test, the user has the option of choosing to have the widget either show a mesh or a table of results.

High Density Meshes and Mesh Improvements

The mesh tests are a very popular feature and we continue to respond to the most common UX enhancement requests. We’ve made the following improvements:

• For very large meshes, we’ve added dynamic horizontal and vertical scrollbars when the mesh gets beyond a certain size.
• For “Network Performance Meshes” shown in the Synthetics Performance Dashboard, a label has been added to clearly indicate the 15-minute range. Clicking the link propagates the 15-minute time range so that the test results page shows the same results as the performance dashboard.
• The “Customize” button has been renamed to “Show/Hide” for clarity
• We increased the string length for labels on the left and top edges of the meshes that represented sites to allow the strings to be longer and wrap across multiple lines so as to let users determine which paths/routes are failing with a quick glance of the mesh.
• Hovering over the individual cells of a mesh would show location information as city, state, country, which is not easily actionable when testing between public cloud regions or private sites. This is now enhanced with both pieces of information.

• The Cloud Performance preset meshes are well-received. We improved the UX around parsing their information as well as customization:
  • We added the ability to easily clone them (like the SaaS applications), which allows customers to customize them to make a "yybrid-cloud" mesh out of it for their own specific network performance needs.
  • We also show cloud regions in addition to geo (city/state) information in the labels to the left and the top.

Flow Data in Mesh Test Results

Showing real traffic time-series charts alongside synthetics metrics in the test details is an important feature, but this wasn’t possible to do for site-to-site tests (like agent-to-agent tests or mesh tests) because there was no IP to query based on. We solved this by leveraging the new site-IP configuration that was added to the device configuration. If a site-IP is present it will be used to build the traffic chart and allow the user to jump into Data Explorer to slice and dice the data further.

General Improvements

Several general improvements to the UX have been made in response to customer feedback:

• The workflow to find a failing sub-test’s details (the time-series charts) is simplified by making the agent dots on the map clickable. Clicking them now takes you to the test details:

• Defining and assigning a notification channel in the test creation screen is much more intuitive than it was before:

• It wasn’t clear to users that it takes a while (up to a day) for IP changes to reflect. We added a tooltip for this:

• The point where the day changed on the test timeline was not clear — this is improved visually. Also, the date format shown in the selector now matches the format of the date shown on the timeline:

• The agent version for customer’s private agents is now visible to them. Also, checking a customer’s private agents’ IPs and versions is simplified — the agents’ information is readily available in the table:

• Paused tests now show in historical data.
• Test results legend previously said “ICMP could be blocked.” This has been generalized, as the test could be TCP or UDP.

Synthetics

Kentik’s product and engineering teams continued rapid iteration on Kentik Synthetics. The mesh test display has been greatly enhanced to handle large meshes, and synthetics widgets are now available for dashboards and My Kentik Portal. Flow-based traffic data has also been added to mesh test results. This builds on Kentik’s unique combination of synthetics and real traffic information to help our customers easily choose and set up the right tests.

New Insights

We’ve also added a number of new traffic comparison insights looking for traffic volume changes, changes in volume for cloud services and regions, and changes in OTT dynamics.

Alerting, DDoS & Mitigation

On the DDoS front, we’ve delivered a number of improvements requested by customers. Some are focused on better visibility into mitigation actions and others on usability improvements for policy configuration and alert history.

This January, we introduce the 1st round towards a better way to manage your fleet of kproxy agents.
You can deploy kproxy agents to secure the network telemetry data between your own devices and Kentik's public Flow/SNMP/BGP ingest front-doors, configuring your routing gear to ship this data to a kproxy instance in your network, which will relay the resulting multiplex securely to Kentik's SaaS Clusters.
More information about kproxy here in our knowledge base.

Kproxy is now a first-class citizen in the portal, i.e. it comes with its own Settings screen. This screen comes with the following elements:

• Ability to name and locate your agents in sites that you've configured for other routing devices, and set flow listening IP (mostly useful for config snippets)
• 
• A new onboarding path that will let users deploy a kproxy instance in the first touch experience as a first step in the flow-generating device provisioning first touch onboarding flow.
  
  • The onboarding flow, as well as the modal from the Flow Proxy Agent screen in Settings now displays updated instructions to deploy kproxy both in an ad-hoc manner as well as using the industry-standard systemd service manager.
• The updated deployment method for kproxy now alleviates the need for user-specific API credentials to launch a kproxy instance. Company-global credentials are provided in the instructions, whether in onboarding or on the kproxy settings screen.
• Multiple screens in the existing Kentik UI have been updated to reflect a flow device’s dependency on kproxy as follows:
  • The Network Explorer Device Details page, in the “More Info” section
  • The Settings > Device page with its device details drawer
    
    

Note that existing kproxy-based users will see their kproxies show up in the UI without the site, name and IP metadata associated with them. These can freely be updated as suggested by the UI.