Unveiling Hidden Network Costs: Introducing Traffic Costs
We are excited to announce the early access release of Traffic Costs, Kentik’s newest automated workflow that illuminates the cost of key slices of network traffic. This release is the latest extension of our platform’s network cost intelligence capabilities, enabling users to optimize network spend and maximize profitability.
Read on to learn more!
The network cost challenge
Traditionally, network cost analysis has been a complex, time-consuming, and often imprecise process — one that relies on manual analysis, disparate data sources, and cumbersome spreadsheets that drain valuable engineering resources. Yet for service providers and digital enterprises alike, this type of analysis is critical for improving both cost and operational efficiencies.
Therefore, it came as no surprise that one of the most frequently requested enhancements from our customers was for Kentik to tackle this industry-wide challenge with network cost intelligence capabilities.
We began addressing this need with the launch of Connectivity Costs — a powerful workflow that allows users to input their bandwidth contracts and associated interfaces with edge providers to model monthly network spend across upstream connections. More recently, we added backbone cost support to the workflow, giving customers a centralized view of total spend and Cost per Mbps across edge and backbone providers, sites, markets, and more.
Connectivity Costs has quickly become one of our most successful and widely-used workflows. It also provides incredibly valuable data — giving visibility into the cost structure of any traffic flowing through the interfaces it tracks.
Naturally, the next step (and one our customers were most eager for) was to take this workflow to the next level and develop the ability to quantify the cost of any slice of traffic on the network. And that’s where things got really interesting...
Flow–based Traffic Costs
The reason it’s so difficult for network teams to quickly assess the cost of traffic slices comes down to the complexity of how traffic is measured and billed:
- Traffic is priced monthly using p9x calculations based on 5-minute SNMP samples.
- Traffic often traverses multiple interfaces, and the only way to understand where it went is through flow data.
- However, flow data is sampled and not precise enough for billing, while SNMP provides accurate volume but only at the interface level—not by traffic slice.
In other words: SNMP tells you how much traffic went through an interface, and flow tells you what traffic went through—but neither on its own gives you cost clarity at a granular level. And it gets more complicated – each edge interface is tied to a provider contract with a specific price (e.g., $/Mbps); but, those interfaces carry traffic from many sources—multiple OTTs, ASNs, applications, and customers—all at once. At the same time, a single ASN’s traffic may span multiple interfaces, each with its own cost structure.
This fragmented view makes it nearly impossible to get accurate cost insights without heavy manual analysis. As a result, vital cost data stays buried—forcing network teams to rely on spreadsheets, approximations, and best guesses.
Kentik’s Traffic Costs solves this problem at scale. It automates the entire process, combining flow with the SNMP and contract data from Connectivity Costs, to give you precise, per-traffic-slice cost analysis in just a few clicks.
How to access and use Traffic Costs
Kentik Traffic Costs combines the cost structure and traffic volumes of each interface with your contextually enriched flow data – drawing a complete picture of how traffic moves in and out of your entire network, isolating those traffic slices with precision, and then calculating aggregate costs for those traffic slices to and from specific networks.
All Kentik customer accounts now have access to Traffic Costs. Users will see a new page selection under our platform’s Edge menu for Traffic Costs:
From the main Traffic Costs page, users have the option to generate cost estimates for a particular Source/Destination ASN, ASN Group, or AS Path, or Customer Port, either selecting an entry from the dropdown or entering one to search.
An estimate on a particular AS Group, for example, shows the aggregated cost of all the flow-sampled traffic, no matter where it enters or exits your network.
Below the sankey chart for each estimate, you can see costs broken down by each path contributing to the total traffic slice cost. You can easily see which device and interface the traffic flowed through, the associated cost group, connectivity type and provider, as well as the cost/mpbs for ingress and egress traffic volumes. Our model takes into account the billing direction for your traffic profile, only calculating costs for traffic in the direction of your billing.
Monthly tracking with snapshots
Since flow data is resource intensive and only retained for a finite period of time after ingest, Kentik offers a “Snapshot” feature to save Traffic Cost views. At the top of every query/estimate result is the option to save as a snapshot, so users can retain important cost views for tracking and sharing.
Users can also set up automated monthly snapshots to retain a longer-term view of their costs, where it’s important to have insights over time.
All saved snapshots are available near the bottom of the Traffic Costs landing page, broken out by traffic cost slice. Additionally, users can see their entire Monthly Snapshot History for all traffic slices on the Traffic Costs landing page, making it easy to quickly identify month-over-month trend lines for various traffic slices.
Top Use Cases & Benefits
We believe the use cases for Traffic Costs are incredibly powerful. Here are a few that stand out:
- Identify high-cost paths: Instantly surface routes and interconnects driving the most spend – helping you to develop action plans to optimize traffic engineering and interconnect agreements to reduce costs over time.
- Optimize content delivery costs: Cloud, content, and CDN providers can measure the cost per Mbps to deliver traffic to a specific destination network, enabling data-backed decisions around content delivery strategies and cost optimization.
- Improve profit margins: Tier 2 IP transit providers and managed service providers (MSPs) can instantly calculate how much a downstream customer’s traffic is costing them in upstream costs, and compare it against that customer's revenue—supporting more profitable pricing strategies and stronger negotiating positions during renewals.
- Eliminate manual toil: Replace hours of spreadsheet wrangling and data stitching with automated traffic cost insights – freeing engineering teams to focus on higher-impact work.
- Track cost trends over time: With monthly cost tracking, measure the financial impact of peering optimizations or routing changes – and share progress across teams.
- Democratize cost insights: Make network cost data accessible across the business – from finance to sales to leadership – to enable more accurate transit pricing, better contract negotiations, and data-backed decision making.
See Traffic Costs in action
Watch this short demo video to see a quick walkthrough of Traffic Costs:
And that’s just the beginning!
This first iteration of Traffic Costs provides traffic dimensional slicing by Source/Destination ASNs and Customer Ports, but there’s much more to come! Here’s what we’re working towards on the horizon:
- More granular traffic slicing. Calculate costs by specific CDNs, OTT services and providers, geographic regions or markets, and even by groups of internal or external IPs.
- Dynamic “what-if” pricing analysis. Model cost scenarios on the fly—like estimating the impact of a $0.05/Mbps price drop from a transit provider on total spend toward a specific network.
- Proactive budget tracking and forecasting. Stay ahead of spend with current-year budget monitoring, alerting, and predictive forecasting to keep you aligned with financial targets.
What else would you like to see in our Traffic Costs workflow? Let us know your experience and thoughts – we’d love to hear your feedback!
For more information about Traffic Costs, check out the Kentik Knowledge Base. If you have questions, would like to see a demo, or would like hands on help to better understand Traffic Costs in your environment, contact your Kentik account team.