March 2022 comes with a flurry of new Synthetic Monitoring feature updates. Amongst others:

• A new top-level location for the BGP route viewer page
• Multiple enhancements to the synthetics Performance Dashboard

BGP Route Viewer Page

Similar to the State of the Internet page, we have moved the BGP Route Viewer tab into a separate top-level page. We recently introduced BGP performance monitoring as part of the Kentik Network Observability Cloud, and want to give this feature more visibility as many customers requested it. If you’d like to learn more about this feature and its use cases read the blog post, Introducing BGP monitoring from Kentik.

Performance Dashboard enhancements

We continue to enhance the Performance Dashboard moving it more towards being a true dashboard. The updated widgets include: The incident log (width), the Test Status Summary pane (styling and location), the Recently Added Tests (styling and location), and Agents and Credits (styling and location).

We just introduced a new "State of the Internet Page" that helps you quickly answer the proverbial question "is it me (my network) or the Internet?"

From this newly created top-level page, you can quickly determine without having to build any complex test if any broader reachability issue outside of their reach is impacting the digital experience of your customers. We (Kentik) run tests from our global Synthetics agent fleet to various public network services and provide the data to you (our customers) for free.

This new page can be found in the navigation menu here:

Under this you'll find 3 tabs today with more planned in the future. The first measures performance of common SaaS applications that your organization uses. The second provides a quick view of the state of the common clouds (connectivity between their regions). And the third one provides uptime and availability of common DNS services.

While these measurements are from tests Kentik runs continuously from its global agents, you can customize (create your own version) of any of these from the pages, by clicking the little "customize" icon.

Landlords can now set a different My Kentik Portal landing page to replace its default landing screen. Each tenant can have a different landing page, and it is configured in the “Views” section of a tenant’s configuration screen:

February 2022 comes with a broad set of Kentik Cloud improvements. Google VPC Flow Logs now include GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) dimensions, users can now post their own AWS metadata using a newly created ingest API (instead of allowing Kentik to retrieve it via AMI assumption), dissociate the accounts used to collect Flow Logs vs Cloud Metadata, and last but not least, the Kappa agent for Kubernetes celebrated its 1.0 version !

Google Kubernetes Engine dimensions

Kentik Data Explorer now supports Google’s extended flow logs for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) environments. Google extended their VPC Flow Logs to include annotations that describe network traffic inside the Google Kubernetes Engine environment – i.e, the pods, services, nodes, etc. After hearing from a customer who needed this capability inside Kentik, our engineering team added support for these new dimensions.

AWS Agentless Ingest

Kentik Cloud users can now choose how they want to send their cloud data (VPC flow logs and AWS metadata) to Kentik. This helps solve a problem for some who couldn’t allow Kentik to reach into their AWS accounts via an IAM role assumption. We have exposed a REST API to which you can manually post AWS metadata and we can provide a Kentik-hosted S3 bucket to which VPC flow logs can be written or replicated.

Improved Metadata-only onboarding/settings

It’s now easier to configure an AWS cloud export to collect only metadata from a given account/region. Now that we’ve made this simpler, anyone should be able to understand how to configure such environments.

Enhanced kappa agent for Kubernetes

Kentik has released version 1.0 of the eBPF-based kappa agent for Kubernetes network performance and telemetry. Improvements in this version include easier deployment, critical performance telemetry (% Retransmit and % Out of Order Packets), and host metadata reporting.

KMI is a new service provider workflow that uses the global routing table to classify the peering and transit relationships between ASes and to identify the providers, peers, and customers for any AS in any geography. KMI estimates the volume of IP space transited by ASes in different geographies and produces rankings based on that volume, thereby enabling users to compare ASes in various markets.

This new workflow is available to all Kentik users with Premier Edition or with the service provider add-on available for the Kentik Pro Edition. This new workflow does not require any configuration and is immediately usable, as it relies on public routing data from a large number of BGP vantage points all around the world.

As routing data gets crunched on a daily basis, it can now be consumed via a simple interface allowing our users to decrypt how networks are connected to each other, what any network’s customer base looks like or what their providers and peers are.

KMI uses the global routing table to classify the peering and transit relationships between ASes and to identify the providers, peers, and customers for any AS in any geography.

Additionally, KMI scores and ranks any network against the size of their customer base in any subdivision of markets, as well as per customer base type such as retail, wholesale or backbone. KMI can now serve as a public, neutral and objective benchmark to score and rank all networks.

Here are a few pointers to get you started with KMI:

• Product page: Kentik Market Intelligence
• Blog post: Launching a labor of love, Kentik Market Intelligence
• Press release: Kentik Market Intelligence launches to benchmark the internet
• Knowledge Base article: Details about how the neutral, objective scoring and ranking algorithm works

A lot of new additions have surfaced in February 2022 in the Kentik Map UI. Amongst others, users will find: a health digest reporting function, new layers for AWS Regions and cloud backbone, as well as improvements in the map legends.

Kentik Map Health Digest

An indicator in the toolbar gives a count of issues we’ve discovered on your network and opens a popover that provides a high-level rundown. Click the View Problems button to see a list detailing the issues, then drill down to the map to see an impacted component in the context of its surrounding infrastructure.

Kentik Map Layer Selector

A new layer selector for the Kentik Map lets you choose which categories of overlays to display, including link traffic types, traffic layer types, cloud regions and backbones, traffic utilization, health, and clustering.

Kentik Map legends

The legends that identify the value ranges represented by link colors are now persistent, so it’s always easy to see what the colors mean.

Kentik Map AWS Regions and Backbones

A layer for AWS regions and backbones has been added to the Kentik Map.

Kentik continues to expand the agent fleet for synthetics, giving users more flexibility and locations from which to originate tests.

App agents, which until now were only available as global agents, can now be deployed as a private agent. App agents differ from network agents in that they support both network and web layer tests.

With private app agent support, customers can run network and web layer tests from within their environment. For example, customers can run Page Load tests to measure the performance of key websites from their branch or data center locations or any location they can install a private agent. In addition to web performance metrics, they can also collect network performance metrics — loss, latency, jitter, etc., to these destinations, with an app agent.

The app agents are initially targeted towards supporting new web layer test types (Page Load and transaction tests) but they are able to run all test types so users that want to install a single agent for all test types can use the app agent. The app agent can be deployed using Debian/Ubuntu, RPM or Docker packaging.

The agent will be marked beta as we continue to collect usage data/feedback from users. We recommend the existing network agent for non-web layer testing.

Read the Knowledge Base entry for Kentik App Agents.

This new feature is the beginning of a broader Kentik initiative to share the Network Observability love outside of the Kentik user crowd. As a lot of our users have asked for means to be able to reliably and systematically share Kentik visualization outside of their own silo, all the way to public audiences, Kentik now offers Public Link Sharing ! 

Sharing is caring

Publicly accessible visualization pages can now be created from Data Explorer visualizations and Synthetics test results and shared as links with people who aren’t registered Kentik users.

As of Friday, February 25th, users can use Public Link Shares. This feature allows users to share Data Explorer visualizations and synthetic monitoring tests with unauthenticated users. This feature has many useful applications, such as helping:

• Efficiently instrument troubleshooting sessions internally and externally
• Show evidence of outages and performance issues to vendors
• Augment support responses to customers with actual, interactive evidence
• Build brand confidence by transparently communicating on outages and their impact
• Empower your product and marketing teams with tools to showcase the performance of your infrastructure

Each public share created comes with a public URL in the form of: https://portal.kentik.com/share///