Kentik's Cloud Performance Monitor is a great way to see at a glance the performance and accessibility of different services provided by AWS.

This month, we added support for Aurora and Lambda services. Customers may use the Cloud Performance Monitor to see the amount of traffic forwarded to and from these services. In addition to the traffic volume, customers can also see AWS service performance information, such as HTTP latency and status codes, if they deploy synthetic agents with tests targeting those service endpoints. Set up synthetic tests that target Aurora and Lambda service endpoints to see performance information similar to what is shown below:

Note: The Cloud Performance Monitor page is dynamic and shows only services actively communicating with your cloud deployment. If your account doesn’t show these new services or the services pictured in the screenshot above, that’s likely due to a lack of traffic towards those services in your environment.

Google Cloud allows customers to configure sampling rates at the flow records generation point on a per-subnet basis, which can significantly reduce the cost of flow log generation.

The Kentik portal now displays the average sampling rate for each exporter and the number of subnets configured with sampling. This is not a configuration knob, but a value configured on the Google Cloud dashboard. The inclusion of this data in Kentik Cloud provides a quick way for users working multi-cloud environments to consume sampling rate information.

We are happy to announce the general availability of Azure Firewall logs as a datasource following its initial introduction in May.

Customers can consolidate flow records generation by using Azure Firewall as the primary source of flow information sent to Kentik. The ingest process is identical to the one used for NSG flow logs and requires customers to store records in their storage accounts.

Customers can filter traffic flows traveling through a particular firewall in the Data Explorer by using the “Logging Resource Category” and “Logging Resource Name” dimensions and then excluding NetworkSecurityGroupFlowEvent (NSG flow logs):

Note: Azure Firewall flow logs don’t have traffic throughput information, so users must choose flows/s as the metrics instead of bit/s. This will create a visualization similar to the graph shown above, and allow Kentik to see flows going through the firewall. With these metrics, customers can determine the relative load of the Azure Firewall and attribute flows to the firewalls.

For customers seeking traffic throughput information from Azure Firewall Logs, the Azure team has advised using “Fat Flows”. However, at the time of publishing this announcement, the Fat Flows feature is in preview and unavailable for API ingestion. Once it is fully supported in the API, Kentik will add “Fat Flows” support.

To simplify troubleshooting workflows in Google Cloud, we've added several new details to the Kentik Map for Kentik Cloud. In the Cloud Network Details sidebar, we've added support for displaying the Firewall Policies that apply to each VPC. We've also added support for displaying details about the Load Balancers deployed in each VPC.

The new Firewall Policies area complements the Firewall Rules area added in July 2023, which shows the actions taken by those rules—denied and allowed traffic—in the selected VPC. 

For troubleshooting, the VPC details sidebar is now the single destination for getting all information related to firewall actions and rules:

In addition, the Cloud Network Details sidebar now also contains detailed metadata about the load-balancers deployed in the selected VPC:

In the coming months, we're going to consistently streamline the Settings screen as you have known it.

Today, we're sharing the 1st iteration of this broader project – Organization Settings. Kentik users now have a new Organization Settings menu displayed next to User Settings at the top right of the navigation bar, making it easier and faster to manage company and organization-wide settings.

Let's start with what's new in the Organization Settings menu:

• Licenses moved from the top Navigation menu to this menu
• All of the additional links in this menu have been moved over from the Settings screen 
• You'll also notice that your Kentik Company ID (CID) is now mentioned at the top right of this menu

The User menu is right next to it and now looks like this – the entries are self-explanatory. User Name, Email, and your Kentik Portal User ID (UID) are now displayed in this menu.

Thanks to relocating many of these entries from the Settings page, the Settings page now displays a more streamlined and clean look. Additionally, we've created a dedicated section for all Alerting settings to be housed – making the page much more homogenous and easy to navigate for users. 

Let us know how you feel about these changes! 

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:

• Devices list as in "Settings > Networking Devices" 
• Sites list as in "Settings > Manage Sites"
• Users list as in "Settings > Manage Users"

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!

More Customer / Provider analytics history

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.

IP / Prefix metrics additions

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.

Ranking history

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:

• If the DNS Record Type is “A” or “AAAA”, this field allows the user to configure the list of IP addresses that are considered “healthy” for the resolved IP address of the testing DNS query. If the DNS Server monitor test query resolves to multiple IP addresses, they should all be part of the configured list. If the resolved IP addresses are not in the allowed list, the test Health will be set to Critical.
• If the DNS Record Type is “CNAME*”,* the field allows the user to specify a comma-separated list of canonical name records that are considered "healthy”.
• If the DNS Record Type is “NS”, the field allows the user to specify a comma-separated list of server names that are considered "healthy”.

The following screenshot shows the Allowed DNS Results field in the DNS Server monitor configuration.