Today we roll out a myriad of changes to supercharge our Search capabilities. When we began looking at product usage statistics, it became quite clear rather quickly how little our users were aware of the search capability – either they didn't know about it, or it didn't pack enough features to be useful, so we set out to improve the functionality. Today, you'll notice the search bar is now ubiquitous, i.e. it displays on every single screen in the portal; but, that's not all of it – the updated Search capabilities pack a whole lot more punch than they used to, read on to discover!

Always-on: search anywhere

Let's start with the most obvious changes: 

1. The Universal Search bar is now present on every screen, at the same central top location, and is not hidden behind a keyboard shortcut anymore: this change is part of a long series of future changes that will make Universal Search a much more central piece of UX in Kentik Portal, so we started by giving it its rightful place.
2. For the Keyboard users, we have changed the shortcut to summon it with cmd + / : this is more aligned to SaaS industry standards. Summoning Search without a search term will bring up a much more useful empty state, but don't worry if you're not a keyboard-type user: clicking into it without entering any search term will also bring up the same improved empty state.

Favorite everything!

While working on a more useful empty state for this search overlay, we extended the ability to favorite screens. Starting today, you can favorite almost every screen in the product by clicking on the star icon next to the screen title. This will come in handy with the new empty state this overhauled Search feature comes with, read on.

For instance, you can favorite:

• Any dynamic quick view page, for instance a specific ASN that you've been working on, like Kentik's AS6169 – this basically works for any page of the form https://portal.kentik.com/v4/core/quick-views// this includes Sites, IPs, etc. ...

• Any Top Talkers page from Network Explorer, such as this top IPs page – essentially any screen with a base URL of https://portal.kentik.com/v4/core/quick-views/
  
  
• Any settings screen you often go back to, for instance this Interface Classification settings screen
  
  
• Even better, you can now favorite a specific Capacity Plan you're currently tracking, or a specific Connectivity Costs Provider you want to keep your eye on!

But what's the use of being able to Favorite any screen if these favorites aren't put to good use you rightfully ask? Well. Read on.

An (much) improved empty state

Now that you can favorite any screen, we brought this into the new Universal Search empty state so you can now get quick access to your favorites by just hitting the search keyboard shortcut, or just click into it. A greatly improved search results page will show as an overlay with 3 tabs, two of them being naturally populated with useful empty states: Favorites, Recents, and Search Results.

Until you start typing in the search input field, your favorites will be displayed. If you don't have any, then your Recent Dashboards and Saved Views tab will be active. As soon as you start typing in the search input, the active tab will switch to Search Results.

Amongst other features you'll notice:

• you are able to favorite or un-favorite any item directly from the search results overlay!
• you can entirely navigate the search overlay with a keyboard: 
  • ← and → let you switch between Favorites, Recents, Search Results
  • ↑ and ↓ let you select records in the main search result
  • [Enter] will take you to the selected screen
• Hitting [Esc] clears the search bar if you have text in it, and discard the search overlay when the search input is empty
• The Recents tab now contains a time and category ordered list of the recently viewed Dashboards and Saved views, and you will notice that we now centrally persist your Recently Viewed items.

Better Structured search results

As you type text in the Search input, you'll notice the Search Results tab populating, and we've dramatically improved its appearance and usability, see for yourself – it is now much easier to locate  the right search result using this updated UX.

Moving forward

With this update, we've laid the ground work for powerful, future capabilities for Search. We've made it central and are now ready to tackle the next iterations. At current, we're thinking, in no particular order:

• What if users could search for any screen to navigate towards ? This is about making Search a substitute to click-based navigation – and the most common example out there would be Windows' Search or MacOS' Spotlight.
• Conversational AI everywhere? What if you could directly ask any question on your infrastructure in the Search bar, with a mode that turns it into a Network Copilot prompt?
• Command Bar for Action type commands: with productivity Apps such as Alfred, or Launchbar - we've started to ask ourselves, what if a user wanted to create a new synthetic test directly from the search bar? or add a new device directly from the search bar?

If you have more ideas that you'd like to share with us as to how you foresee the future of our search capabilities, please do let us know!

Since we've overhauled the experience around our Library, we have kept listening to our users' feedback to further improve it.
In the recent past, we've added the following:

• reduced the visual noise by re-designing labels throughout the product
• added the ability to attach multiple labels to every view
• added a toggle to show/hide Favorites and Recents
• introduced RBAC for elements in the Library, allowing users to granularly select which content is available to which users

This time around, we are adding a couple niceties that we think our users may like or have requested in the past, read on!

Last Viewed Attribute

Some of our users have multiple hundreds of Dashboards and Saved Views in their Library. Not all of these user-created analytics are up-to-date and some get stale over time, replaced by newer visualizations.

It has been a frequent ask from the "Librarian" population of our user base to let them order content in the Library based on the date at which it has last been used – this way, they could more safely perform spring cleaning actions and keep their Library as up-to-date and noiseless as possible.

From now on, every time a user opens a Dashboard or Saved View, the meta-data around it gets a timestamp updated to store when it was last opened.

We are presenting this attribute in the "Last Viewed" column of the Library listing table:

This column should be enabled by default for new users and will be added by migration later this month to existing users. If not enabled, hit the "Customize" button at the top-right corner of the listing table:

Trending Views

In our frequent feedback sessions with users, one of the things that often comes up is the difficulty for other users in their company to know if any good Saved Views or Dashboards are available to them.

One of the ways we're attempting to help with this is by computing at regular intervals (once a day or once a week – we're currently experimenting with the frequency) what the Top 10 Dashboards and Saved Views are within each company.

We then tag all of these with a "Trending" label making them easy for users to discover in the library.

We currently use the number of views for each Dashboard/Saved View over the last rolling month to rank them.

In the Library, you can now filter for "Trending" content:

Dashboards or Saved Views which are trending come with a special label associated to their name in the Library content listing table:

And when looking at any Dashboard or Saved View, the title bar will now indicate with a little flame icon if it is trendy (i.e. if it is within the Top 10 of all content in its category within the last month).

We wanted to help our users reduce the back and forth between the library and Saved Views/Dashboards: observing sample sessions, we realized users often developed routines which consisted in periodically checking on multiple Dashboards or Saved Views one after the other.
If these users could simply load the next Dashboard or a Saved View directly from the current one they are looking at, we could shave off minutes of unnecessary interactions every day.

In a previous release, we established the following UX pattern to resolve this use case for Saved Views: a new toggle in the grey sub-nav would upon click unveil a drawer allowing users to immediately search and access their Saved Views without the expense of an unnecessary trip to the Library.
You can see the announcement here: https://new.kentik.com/new-data-explorer-saved-views-drawer-2Ft2Y8

This time around, we're extending this exact concept to the Dashboard runtime. The benefits are exactly the same:

• No need to go back to the Library to select the next Dashboard to load
• The newly added Library panel contains Favorites, Recents, but also search capabilities
• The Library drawer is entirely designed to be keyboard friendly:
  
  
  • move between Favorites/Recents/Search Results tab using the keyboard arrow keys
  • scroll up and down the list of results in the drawer with the vertical arrow keys
  • upon selection, load any Dashboard with the [Return] keystroke

For visual documentation purposes, here's where the "Dasbhoard" drawer toggle button is:

... and here's how it looks once expanded, both in its compact and cosy modes

Compact Mode

Cosy Mode

What's next ? We will keep using this pattern and extend it in other parts of the product to save more of our users valuable time, stay tuned.

Not so long ago, we released the Credentials Vault capability, which lets you centrally manage credentials used by Kentik NMS to poll your devices. This allowed for a much more efficient way to provision NMS devices in Kentik:

• without having to redefine the same credentials for each device
• supporting the need to swap the credentials used by Kentik for a large amount of devices in a central way

The Credentials Vault was released including Synthetic Monitoring capabilities to let users leverage centrally defined credentials from the Vault in the authentication steps of all forms of HTTP and Transaction Tests.

We are also currently extending the Credentials Vault-only method  from Kentik NMS to flow devices - as you know, both SNMP polling and BGP MD5 config info for these is still currently stored at a local, device-per-device level. This should feature should be released in the weeks to come, and once done, both NMS and Flow devices will both exclusively leverage the Credentials Vault.

Yet, this post focuses another aspect of Credentials Vault that we are improving today.

What is RBAC for Credentials Vault ?

When we created Credentials Vault, we relied on our legacy User Levels (Member, Admin, SuperAdmin) to go with simple defaults: basically Members cannot create any credentials but can list/use them, while only Admins and SuperAdmins are allowed to create/update/delete credentials - and this all seemed like reasonable defaults.

We have heard from a few Customers that their Synthetic Testing users were Member type users allowed to create and author Synthetic Tests, but were blocked because they weren't allowed to create credentials. The corollary being that these users would need to ask Admin users to register these secrets for them in their place, increasing the risk surface of leaking them when needing to send them over email or chat.

We agreed that this was not the most secure approach to it and took the opportunity to roll Credentials Vault into our RBAC framework.

How can you add RBAC permissions to users to let them create Credentials in the Vault?

Users with the ability to create and edit RBAC roles will now be able to assign these new permissions to roles (and in turn the users these roles are assigned to)

Beyond this, the label-based permission framework has been made available to Secrets in the Credentials Vault so that users can for instance only have access for view and edit to secrets with specific labels.

For instance, the following Vault Secret Creators role will allow users in this role to:

• to create secrets
• only view and use secrets labeled Production or CDN
• only update credentials with the CDN label

So to conclude, if you need your low-privilege Member users to be able to create credentials, a speedy option is to

1. create a new RBAC Role containing the "Can create credential secret" permission enabled
2. directly add users to that role from the "Users" tab of the same screen
3. profit.

As consumers of alerts, you want every alert to be easy to understand, meaningful, and actionable. But when systems bombard you with alerts for metrics you don't need, it's hard to distinguish between the signal of what matters from the noise of what doesn't (cue alert fatigue). Claude Debussy said, “Music is the space between the notes.” That space enables resonation and expression. Music needs a degree of emptiness to be truly appreciated, and the same holds true when it comes to alerting.

We've listened to your feedback and have significantly improved our synthetics alerting capabilities to help reduce the noise and increase alert accuracy. The changes we've made with Synthetics Alerting give our customers the ability to receive more detailed alert notifications, while giving you agency over the individual metrics that are critical to your success – and perhaps more importantly, the ability to silence the metrics that are not. 

Flexible Health Options

For a long time, we have set extreme thresholds to disable certain metrics from causing an unhealthy health status in our tests. While this technically works, it does not make for a great user experience. As part of the new Alerting stack, the Synthetics team developed new switches that allow for individual metrics to be enabled or disabled when determining an unhealthy status and ultimately, an alert notification.

Single Metric Alerting & Improved Alert Notifications

Another big improvement to Synthetics Alerting is the change to alert tracking by single metrics. The system now keeps track of triggers for each health-enabled metric and will trigger alerts for them individually. When combined with Flexible Health Options, users can tailor their alerts to only the metrics that fit their use case. This provides more clarity of what is going wrong with a test when receiving an alert.

Based on user feedback, we have added a new option for the way our Network Mesh and Agent-to-Agent tests alert. Previously, alerts were tracked by test – calculating health and alerts for the test as a whole; however, this was not a perfect fit for every use case. 

The Synthetics team has now deployed changes allowing alerts to be calculated and tracked on a per agent basis. With this feature enabled, each agent in a test will have its own trigger for the test's health thresholds and one test can have multiple ongoing alerts for different agent-to-agent pairings. Simply select the Agent option in the Status Calculations field to have the test tracked on a per agent basis. 

If you have any feedback on this new option, please reach out to your CSM. We are continuing to improve our alerting options and aim to bring even more health and alerting features to Kentik Synthetics as we migrate to Alerts 2.0.

At Kentik, one of our core goals with synthetic monitoring is to enable your team to quickly and effectively triage any issues that come your way. This effective triage process starts with ensuring alerts are easily delivered to the right team in their preferred notification method. 

Previously, alerts associated with agent issues (downtime or recovery) would show and alert in the same notification channel and test results summary in the UI. Based on feedback, we realized this setup was not optimized for customer needs. 

We are pleased to share that agents can now be configured to send status alerts to their own notification channel. Simply navigate to the  'Synthetics' > ‘Agent Management’ section of the portal, select an agent, and click Configure to set up status alerting and notification channel(s) for that specific agent. To see agent downtime details, select the agent and click on the ‘Agent Downtime' tab.

With this setup, an email notification is sent for down or recovering agents.

The notification links to the ‘Agent Downtime Details’ tab under the ‘Agent Management’ part of the portal.

We are excited to announce a new feature in Kentik Journeys AI (Preview) - the new feature enables users to ask "How-to" questions relevant to a Kentik documentation and usage. The primary sources of information for the answer are our Knowledge Base and Kentik Blog posts. 

Some example questions that Journeys AI can answer:

• how to install kproxy on ubuntu
• how to install kbgp in docker
• what is peeringdb and how it is used in Kentik
• how to configure AWS cloud flow logs export in Kentik portal
• what are Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN dimensions and list them in the table
• what are available endpoints in Kentik API v5
• can you provide details on how to get all sites over API?

You can also ask questions and get answers in your language, for example: 

• me mostre como instalar o kentik kproxy no ubuntu. por favor explique isso em português

Please share your experience with us and use thumbs up/down to rate the answers you received.

It's no secret that Data Explorer is one of the most used modules in Kentik Portal. Today we're releasing a convenience feature that lets users decide which metrics are used by default for their Data Explorer queries.
A lot of our heavy Data Explorer users have been asking for this in the past and we're happy to announce that the feature is now generally available. Enjoy!

By default, Data Explorer always uses the same three default metrics when users build queries from scratch:

Each user company have their different golden metrics that they rely on, and speaking with customers, it appeared that some of you ended up constantly needing to change the metrics in Data Explorer as you are building queries from the ground up.
To make it easier, we built the "Default Metrics" functionality in that same "Metrics Selector" UI.

At the bottom of the metrics selector, you will now notice this new Default Metrics panel

This panel will let you do the following

• Clicking on "Set as Default" will set the currently selected Metrics as default:
  The next new Data Explorer query you will create will have these metrics selected by default. Saving currently selected Metrics to default also includes the settings in the Primary and Secondary Display and Sort Metrics.
• Hovering on "Load Defaults" will show you the ones you've set as default:
  Before loading these to replace the current set of selected metrics, a tooltip will show you what the metrics are in your default set, as well as which one is the primary, and which one is the secondary. Both will be highlighted with a colored dot, as well as a number showing you which one is primary or secondary.
• Clicking on "Load Defaults" loads these queries in replacement of the currently selected ones

Important side note
These defaults are set per user: they may differ between different users within the same company.

Following on to the the release of Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in Kentik Portal we initiated a long journey which will eventually lead to legacy User Levels ("Member", "Admin", "SuperAdmin") to disappear from the product. Throughout the quarters, we are migrating existing portal features under the RBAC umbrella, so that an increasing number of functionality becomes subject to granular permissions.
With this iteration, we are adding two changes:

• we have redesigned the RBAC Admin UI both in the RBAC section, and in the User Management Section
• we are adding label-based RBAC support for Dashboards and Saved Views

Read on !

Admin interface changes for RBAC Management

We have decided to move away from a Modal based format to a full screen based format, as we felt the information presented for RBAC configuration was too dense to comfortably fit in a small modal. See for yourself in the screenshots below:

On the "Manage Users" screen, beyond the design change of the User Edit modal into a full page, we have added new capabilities such as the ability to identify which role a specific permission on a user comes from:

Label-based RBAC

We also added a novel functionality allowing our users to manage RBAC at scale: Label-based RBAC. As you may have noticed, labels have been extended to a lot of additional areas within Kentik Portal, amongst others to the "Library".

With Label-based RBAC, you can assign permissions to a role that apply to an exclusive set of labels, instead as to all elements of the same kind. This functionality is at current available to Dashboards and Saved Views permissions and allows to restrict the permission to content marked with specific labels - this is displayed in the screenshot below from the edit screen of a role.

Here are a few important gotchas about Dashboards and Saved Views RBAC permissions:

• To be able to change labels (add, remove) on a Dashboard (resp. Saved View), the user needs to have the Dashboard (resp. Saved View) Update permissions (this avoids privilege escalations via RBAC).
• Labels configured in 'Label Access" type permissions are all OR'ed together, meaning said permission is valid for any view with any of the configured labels on it.
• Assigning label-based Dashboards (resp. Saved Views) permissions supersedes the "Sharing" settings of these: if a view is shared but a given user's RBAC permissions for accessing or editing dashboards are restricted to certain labels, they won't be able to view or edit them: i.e. "Label Access" is more restrictive than "Full Access" as the name indicates.
• if a user has both a "Full Access" permission to views in one role, and a "Label Access" permission to the same view type, the resulting user permission for that view time is the union of both, i.e. "Full Access"

What's next ?

As we progress on this RBAC journey, your user input as what your most wanted areas of Kentik Portal to be RBAC'ed matters. We are all ears on what you'd like us to offer next on that front !