Latest features, improvements, and product updates on Kentik's Network Observability platform.
All synthetics tests can now be run at the lower frequencies of 30 or 60 mins. Prior to this addition the lowest supported frequency was 15 mins.
These lower frequency options allow customers to monitor targets which require less aggressive monitoring and which would otherwise have been cost prohibitive to monitor at faster frequencies.
We're excited to announce 16 new Global Agents distributed globally and located in several major Broadband ISPs: AT&T, Altice (Suddenlink), Cox, Comcast, KDDI, SK Broadband, Spectrum (Charter), Vectra, Verizon and Vodafone
Page Load tests now include a Document Object Model (DOM) Waterfall view into how individual objects on the page have loaded. This is a per agent view accessed via Results > View Details for any Page Load test. Visibility into the DOM Waterfall lets customers identify which DOM elements are contributing the most to the overall page load time.
March 2022 marks a new beginning for our Alerting and Insights feature-sets. Expect a more changes in the next coming month, but in the mean time, here's a taste of what's new.
Our design teams are on a mission to improve the consistency of experience and ease of use of the Kentik portal. We are taking a “common design, common experience” approach that uses common code to generate simple, intuitive and predictable controls. This should significantly improve navigation.
Let’s start with navigation where we have updated the location of Insights, Alerting and Mitigations, which reflects the most common usage.
Based on customer feedback we have separated Alerts and Insights, reducing the possibility of confusion between the two.
The Insights landing page presents a filtered/sorted list of individual insights. Selecting the insight will navigate to the Insight Details page.
On the Alerting page we are now using our common table design with filtering, sorting, searching and controls that will look and feel familiar to users across the platform. The navigation path for Alerting presents a table of active alerts, also filtered, with sortable columns. Selecting the alert will expand a sidebar with the alert details. Table controls include time range filtering, status, severity, and type filters, and several specific search options.
The Mitigations page has been redesigned, using this same admin table pattern as we use for the Alerts, Policies, and Templates pages. Navigation to the Mitigations page is either direct from the main menu, or from a link on the Alerting page. Selecting a mitigation opens a sidebar drawer. Opening the sidebar exposes a navigation link to the Alert that triggered the mitigation.
March 2022 marks another important milestone milestone in Kentik's Hybrid Cloud observability product offering by not only releasing Azure Maps, but also adding AWS VPC endpoint support.
In March we made a large leap forward in enhancing our multi-cloud observability solution. We are introducing the first version of our Kentik Map for Azure, providing a similar look and feel to the AWS map. While many concepts are the same, there are differences, for example a VPC in AWS is a VNET in Azure:
Similar to AWS, we are now showing the Azure regions including their VNETs, allowing users to click into the subnets, and display traffic and other details:
We now display VPC endpoints in the AWS Map as network gateways so that map users can easily view traffic to (or in some cases, from) these constructs.
March 2022 comes with a flurry of new Synthetic Monitoring feature updates. Amongst others:
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.
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 !
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.
Edit Dimensions in Kentik Data Explorer will now include choices to include new annotations from network traffic inside the Google Kubernetes Engine environment.
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.
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.
The manual setup menu for AWS Cloud now includes a configuration option to collect metadata only.
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.
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: