Latest features, improvements, and product updates on Kentik's Network Observability platform.
A lot of our users have been asking for a way to export a spreadsheet of a certain amount of configuration items from Kentik Portal, namely:
This is now available on all of these screens by clicking the "Action > Export > Data Table (.csv)" on all of these three screens
Following multiple requests from our Kentik Market Intelligence users, we have just added additional Network Level metrics and visualizations that will help our users more precisely gauge the size of the Network (Autonomous System) they are investigating.
Read on for more details!
First, we are now showing a history of provider and customer counts by month over the past 12 months. For instance, it can come in handy to notice a decrease in the number of providers for a given network, as it may create an opportunity for you to insert yourself as a new provider.
Noticing a sudden increase in the number of customers in a given region will also show KMI users the prospecting efforts of the network they are looking at are bearing fruits in a specific region.
Even more interesting, the charts displayed on this page are all governed by the top-level filter on the page, meaning that Customer Count by month can be narrowed down to any specific market you'd like to dive into.
Another addition revolves around quantifying the size of any network's transit customer cone. The simplest metrics used in this case are often the density of the IP Address Space transited (for a Transit Provider) or Originated (for a Retail Network). These are now displayed (put in perspective with those of your own configured network) as depicted in the screenshot below:
Beyond the plain count of IPs, we are also showing a histogram of both Originated and Transited prefixes by prefix length, which can be a good indication of the size of the currently viewed Networks' customers. Again, these are also governed by the top-level filters on the screen.
Lastly, as most of you noticed on the landing screen, we have always kept a 12-month rolling history of rankings for all the ASNs in our dataset. Although we have only been displaying it for the "Ranking over time" top panel on our landing page, we've always had this data in store.
We are now offering it in the "Rankings" tab of any ASN's Network Detail page, as you can see below – again, this data and the rankings are governed by the top-level filters, which can be set on each screen. This means you can instantly assess how well any given network has been doing over the past 12 months in any market of your choice!
Kentik has released a new Alerts reporting feature that lets you choose the type of Alerts (including DDoS) that you are interested in, along with the retention period (up to 90 days) and then either export this data or choose to schedule and subscribe to this report.
This is version 1 of reporting for Alerts. This feature was suggested by our customers and provides initial reporting functionality around alerts. We plan to enhance this in future releases with more types of data, visualizations and analytics.
Example: I want to create a report of all my DDoS alerts (attacks) grouped by policies for the last 30 days.
Start by using the filter to apply the alert types, the retention period, summarization, grouping, etc. This is the main configuration of the report. Whatever you see here in the view is how the report will be created and viewed.
Then under the "Actions" drop-down in the upper right corner of the portal UI, you can choose to export this data directly or choose to set up a subscription to create a new report, say Monthly, and deliver it by email.
Fill out all of the desired subscription information and click "Subscribe"
We are happy to announce a new Health Map by Site Alerts Widget that can be configured and viewed from within the Kentik Observation Deck Dashboard. This is the first of many new widgets planned to be developed to give the Enterprise a tailored view of your networks and Infrastructure
This new widget supports customers needing a type of NOC (Network Operations Center) view and status (Health) of their current locations based on Kentik Alerts. The User can then react quickly and take action on their most critical alerts.
Clicking on a site either in the map or the table will drill down into that specific location and display all the current alerts based on the filter settings.
To see a brief setup video click on the link below and follow the guide in the video.
The DNS Server monitor tests are improved with the additional Health check Allowed DNS Results. This field allows the user to configure the list of expected values, which depend on the selected DNS Record Type:
The following screenshot shows the Allowed DNS Results field in the DNS Server monitor configuration.
The Kentik Synthetics HTTP/API and Web Page Load tests now support checking of the HTTP Response Headers to determine the Health condition of the test.
The user can configure one or more expected Response Headers:
If the configured headers exist in the response, but are not equal to the expected values, or do not exist in the Response at all, the test health will be set to Critical.
The screenshot below demonstrates the example configuration of this feature.
Customers can now apply a single notification channel to one or more alert policies.
From the Alert Policies page, select the policies that you would like to use, and click on the "Add Notifications" button:
Then select your existing or create a new notification channel and select "Continue"
The selected policies will now use the selected Notification Channel
You can now schedule Silent Mode for alerts with a start and stop time for a policy or a pattern creation. This new feature will allow customers to silence alerts during maintenance windows automatically, for example.
We are happy to announce the support for the Google Cloud firewalls for Kentik Cloud.
For customers looking for an easy and simple way to check and troubleshoot connectivity inside GCP and see what type of traffic is being denied by the configured firewall rules, we show that under the "Details" sidebar for every VPC.
We added a new dimension for the Data Explorer, allowing customers to use the Subscription name to identify traffic flows and create alerts and dashboards.
Previously only Subscription ids were used for that purpose, and that’s not ideal, as ids are not easily humanly readable and are machine-generated.