Today, we just released a significant update to the way Kentik users will share the Kentik network observability experience, inside and outside of the company.

We have taken a set of horizontal features and have grouped them into consistent UX patterns for sharing Kentik content, whether these are reports, public snippets or even subscriptions. Read on!

What’s new?

With this update, we’ve centralized the Sharing functionality and streamlined the way it is presented on all screens of the UI/UX. As explained earlier, this creates a more holistic approach to sharing data from Kentik inside and outside.

This includes multiple areas of work, detailed in the sections below.

A redesigned, streamlined Share button on every screen

Extending the subscription capabilities to many more screens

Historically, subscriptions were only available for dashboards, we wanted to do more to meet Kentik users “where they live”.
We extended subscriptions to a discrete set of screens/workflows, with the intent of furthering this list in the future. Subscriptions are available immediately for the following items (we followed our users and their feature requests to make a determination on which to work on first):

• Dashboards
  We’ve added a few under the hood goodies such as the ability to treat carriage returns properly in subscription email messages, as well as offering another previously unavailable frequency: “Last Day of the Month” (useful to vet connectivity invoices at the end of the month)
  
  
• Saved Views
  Subscriptions were not available for Saved Views previously. They are now.
  
  
• Connectivity Costs
  We’re offering here a compelling subset of functionality, 4 types of subscriptions can be configured: Summary (corresponding to the summary screen), Provider(s), Site(s) and Connectivity Type(s).
  Each one of the non summary subscriptions allows Admins to configure which set of Providers/Sites/Connectivity Types to configure these subscriptions for to bundle in one delivery.
  
  
• Capacity Planning
  As for Connectivity costs, users can now subscribe to a summary (aka front page) or a subset of Capacity Plans.

Extending the CSV export functionalities to many more screens/workflows

A significant number of non-technical users have requested (via FRs) to be able to download CSV data for some of the most used workflows, and be able to massage it further into their own reporting.

Additional CSV exports available

First and foremost, CSV report download is now available in these workflows/screens

• Saved views

• Connectivity Costs

  • All connectivity costs
  • Per provider
  • Per site
  • Per connectivity type

• Capacity Planning

  • All plans details
  • Any number of plans together in a single CSV

• Kentik Market Intelligence

  • Rankings CSV
  • Customer and Provider CSV for any given network

To further streamline the experience, all reports download actions are now located in the exact same location, regardless to the screen the user is on, that is within the [Action] button as it initially was for Data Explorer.

CSV downloads now available for subscriptions

Not only have these CSV capabilities been extended, but they are now also available in subscriptions, which answers multiple Feature Requests we had had on Capacity Planning and Connectivity Costs.

Below is an example of a Connectivity Cost report being sent 

• for Transit and Paid Private Peering
• As a CSV spreadsheet
• The Last day of the month

Multiple convenience UX changes to make this feature set work better

Settings + relocating Public Link Shares

While initially in the Navigation panel, Public Shares have now been moved together to the Settings screen, in their own “Share” panel to the right, bundled together as a cohesive functional unit:

Subscriptions & Sharing features in Library

1. Library now gives a clear indication of when a given Saved View or Dashboard is involved in a subscription: the underlying goal is for admins to know before modifying a view that other users may be relying on it.
   
   
   
2. Users can also now both subscribe and unsubscribe directly to a Saved View or Dashboard from the library by using the contextual actions:
   

Once Public Sharing is finalized for Saved Views and Dashboards (currently ongoing), a similar marker will be displayed.

Redesigned Report Subscriptions management screen

As displayed in the previous screenshots, the Report Subscriptions UI can now be accessed directly from the Sharing Modal, as displayed below:

The Report Subscriptions management screen has been significantly updated and now offers all the convenience features that our usual list screens offer, such as the search panel on the left.

Amongst the very useful items, Users can now quickly identify using filters:

• Subscriptions that they are recipients of
• Subscriptions that have non-kentik account emails in them (aka Shared Externally)

These two situations being potential data exfiltration threats, the UI allows Kentik Admins to identify them easily.

Subscription Auto-Sense at share time

As users ideally want to limit the amount of email subscriptions being created around the same screen/workflow/report, the sharing modal performs some amount of magic:

If a subscription already exist when the user hits the [Share] button and goes to the Subscription tab, the Subscription Title entry will offer to either

• Modify an existing subscription
  OR
• To create a new one

Sample share screen displaying the choice between "Create New subscription" vs "Edit Existing Subscription"

Observation Deck is our vision for a new focal point of the Kentik platform. It brings together all of our products & modules (current and future), in one place, so customers can get a complete and tailored view of their network and infrastructure. Every new customer will get a curated, default Observation Deck at the end of their initial onboarding. Observation Deck can then be configured to meet their exact needs.

Now customers with Azure Cloud infrastructures can add widgets to their Observation Deck and the Kentik Cloud landing page has been extended to show Azure views as well.

Note the addition of “Cloud Provider Filters” at the top right. This allows to visualize either a multi-cloud environment (“All”), or a specific Cloud. Traffic/flow widgets will filter data by cloud provider if selected.

Azure regions are now shown on the Weathermap.

For a multi-cloud environment, here is how this looks, including the Cloud backbone traffic.

Setting up monitoring of Cloud environments with Kentik can be difficult, especially when users run large multi-account environments. Ensuring that each account has the proper roles with the necessary permissions for Kentik to retrieve metadata and flow logs can be challenging to maintain at scale. That’s where our Cloud Config status comes in. It quickly analyses complex environments to ensure that all accounts are configured as required for Kentik to monitor Cloud networks. This capability is now available for Azure in addition to AWS.

We're excited to announce that our initial launch of Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) is now GA!

Transaction tests expand on our existing suite of web/app layer testing capabilities. While an HTTP/API test tests the availability of the front door (hosting web server) of an application and a Page Load test gives you the ability to test the performance of how a website loads, a Transaction test goes much deeper and allows you to simulate a user's journey as they interact with an application, like logging into an email application or checking out a shopping cart or searching for a stock ticker symbol.

For instance, an e-commerce site has many user workflows which enable a customer to login, search through selections, select payment and delivery options and finalize a transaction. Delays or errors in any of these steps can impact the customer experience and lead to lost revenue. STM will enable you to benchmark the performance of each of these transaction stages and troubleshoot specific performance issues.

Steps to perform STM in Kentik:

1. Mimic the actions of your users as they would log into your application and perform a transaction.
2. Records these actions using the Chrome DevTools Recorder.
3. Open your Kentik account and create a new Transaction Test.
4. Paste the script exported from Chrome DevTools Recorder.
5. Select the agents (private or public) that you’d like to run the test from.
6. Run the test and analyze results.

Here is an example of a Transaction recorded on Chrome DevTools.

We can now export the Transaction script as a Puppeteer script and paste it into new Kentik Transaction script as below 

You can select any of our public Application agents to test from, and/or easily deploy your own private Application agents which we can supply (for Docker, x86 and ARM). STM tests can be set as both automatic and periodic on time intervals.

Presentation of Synthetic Test Monitoring Results

Results are presented on a timeline that shows transaction completion time. Performance is measured against dynamically calculated baselines and lags in performance are colored - orange is a warning, red is critical. 

Selecting a point on the line will indicate total completion time and the rolling standard deviation baseline. 

Screenshots captured during the transaction process provide insight into the script execution flow and aid in troubleshooting. 

The Waterfall tab shows the load order and load duration of each element in the Document Object Model (DOM) of every page visited.

Analyzing the results give us insights into how our users experience the performance of an application in real time from different geographies allowing us to proactively respond to user experience issues before they are reported by real users. When used in conjunction with Kentik's suite of network tests we can identify the root cause of performance issues as originating in the network or application stack within minutes.

Kentik Market Intelligence gets a couple useful improvements added.

KMI will now let you export rankings and customer/provider lists as a CSV file.
Additionally, we've added a "density chart" on top of the KMI landing page before the ranking table.

The  KMI landing page has been updated with what we call a Density Chart: the usual table-chart we all know and love did not really convey the idea of the actual distance between consecutive networks in the ranking. This new widget has been added on top of the ranking table and places Networks on the line based on how far they are from each other in terms of KMI score.
(check out this article out if you want to understand how KMI score are computed)

Based on popular demand from our KMI customers, we've added a functionality to download the CSV data from both the landing page, and any given network's detail page:

We're happy to announce the availability of 17 new Global agents, distributed globally (8 Americas, 5 EMEA, 4 APAC) and connected to Lumen's network (AS3356). Stay tuned for even more geo locations within Lumen's network!

Building on our existing BGP monitoring capabilities – Event Tracking, Hijack Detection, Route Leak Detection and RPKI Status Check – we majorly enhanced our BGP monitoring feature set (under Synthetics) with new visualizations that track BGP Reachability and the BGP AS Path.

See the related blog posts, Introducing BGP Monitoring from Kentik and Why You Need to Monitor BGP, or watch the video (webinar) Why you should monitor BGP and where to start for useful overview information.

To get started: click Menu > Synthetics > BGP RouteViewer (we automatically pull in your AS and Prefix info for you) and click the blue  "Start Monitoring" button. 

Or go to Synthetics > Test Control Center > Add Test > BGP Monitor to create your own test

Reachability tracking

We help you track changes in the reachability of your prefixes from hundreds of vantage points all over the internet and will alert you when any of them become unreachable. You need to be sure that traffic from your ASes can make its way to your customers and the service providers you depend on.

AS path change tracking

Frequent changes in the path that BGP route announcements take between ASes can be a sign of instability. Monitoring for these changes and getting alerted as soon as they occur is a key part of ensuring service reliability.

AS path visualization

Fast troubleshooting of issues requires being able to visualize data to find trouble spots quickly. We give you a 10,000-foot view of changes in BGP routes over time — an indispensable tool!

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