Observation Deck was initially built as a flexible landing page that adapts to users' interest. It includes a library of widgets that aren't available as Data/Metrics Explorer views, but also allows our users to embed views from these two key Infrastructure Analytics query applications. In its initial design, there was only one Observation Deck per user, and no ability for a group of users to share the same.

Discussions with our user base led to these requirements:

• the ability to build and then share Observation Decks across users;
• the ability to share an Observation Deck with users based on their assigned role, serving as a role-specific landing page for the tasks & checks that their roles demand
• the ability to centrally manage Observation Decks assignments as landing pages for different user groups

So... that's what this update is about! Read on! At the end of the article, we'll also share our vision of how Observation Decks and Dashboards will evolve in the short/mid/long term future, so make sure you review the last section.

Introducing the new observation decks

Observation Decks are now their own Library objects

If you go to the Library ([shift]+[s] from any screen in Kentik Portal, one of those magic shortcuts you want to know about) you will notice that the left-side filter panel now offers an additional choice for Type:

This means that you can now create multiple Observation Decks. Here's a few things about how it works:

• These Observation Decks are bound to the same RBAC rules as Dashboards: Shared vs Private settings supersede any RBAC permissions - a new RBAC section allows you to configure permissions for Observation Decks the same way that exists with Dashboards, including per-label permissions

• Important note: This doesn't replace or delete your existing Observation Deck; it has been simply been migrated to a Library object for you so you won't need to re-create it
  • The migrated Observation Decks are Private meaning you only will see them if you had one
  • You can change their share settings and they will then appear to other users in the Library (barring RBAC permissions) - ideally you should change their names before sharing them so you don't end up with multiple titled Observation Deck, each with a different owner

• If your Kentik Portal Landing page was an Observation Deck, the record has been updated in your settings, pointing to the same, migrated library object, which should result in no change to your experience upon login - see section in this article about Observation Deck assignments

A complete overhaul of Observation Deck editing capabilities

With this update, you'll find the previous ability to add widgets from a selection of existing ones with in the + Add Panel dropdown at the top:

We have now made editing Observation Deck simpler - let's go through a few useful changes that we've added:

Edit in place

All Observation Deck panel titles, as well as the main title are now editable in place: hovering on these titles highlights them, clicking loads an inline edit field.

New top level widget types

New widgets have been released that have long been asked by our users:

• Section widget
• Markdown text panel widget

The Section Widget lets you create sections to group panels in and make long Observation Decks easier for the users to consume - see below:

Conveniently, sections are also collapsible/expandable, as shown below:

Markdown Text panels are another addition making this Observation Deck update exciting, look for yourself in the screenshot below.

A couple tricks that we've found very useful when using markdown panels:

• use emojis to display clear do's and don'ts type of instructions
• use arrow characters in the titles to point at a nearby panel if you want to provide an inline explanation to them
• don't hesitate to abuse URL embedding, even if these don't point to wiki documentation: non-public URLs are OK as long as the consuming user has access to the resource the URL points to (private wikis are fine)
• a full library of markdown examples is available here, don't hesitate to steal ideas from it to make your Observation Decks more lively

Central management of Observation Decks as Landing Page experiences

To further Observation Deck's usefulness and make them more manageable at scale in the case of user groups with different demands in Kentik Portal, we've extended management capabilities throughout the Settings experience.

Per user assignment of Observation Deck as a Landing Page

If your user permissions allows it, you can now assign Landing Pages to users yourself (it used to be a user private setting).

In the Company Settings > Users > Edit User workflow, you'll now be able to set a specific Observation Deck as a landing page for any user:

Beyond that, you'll also be able to leverage Bulk Edit capabilities from the same Users management page to assign the same Observation Deck to multiple users at the same time in one fell swoop!

SSO Role-Sets and the associated Landing Page

Some of our users use SSO RBAC Automated Attribute Mapping via Role Sets (see the announcement here): this feature allows Kentik Administrator to set RBAC permissions and enforce them at login based on users' SAML2 attributes, including User Groups.

In that context, a Role-Set is a collection of roles assigned by SSO at login, and it now contains a setting to assign a specific landing page: each who has been assigned a Role-Set containing a Landing Page setting will now default to the selected Landing Page, where a named Observation Deck can be configured, as shown below.

User API extensions for Observation Decks as a Landing Page

Some users prefer relying on programmatic capabilities to set up users using our API - for those we've also extended the User API endpoints to include setting an Observation Deck as a landing page programmatically

What is the future of Dashboards and Observation Decks ?

As a lot of you have already pointed out, Observation Decks and Dashboards are very similar. For example, a lot of our users have asked for an ability to add Observation Deck widgets to Dashboards.

Additionally, we have determined that Dashboards have a high barrier to entry for our newer users, and are too involved to Create or Edit.

For both these reasons, we will merge Observation Decks and Dashboards together in the near future. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of what you can expect:

• All existing Observation Decks will be migrated to dashboards
• The new Dashboards experience will inherit the newer, simplified Edit/Create User Experience of Observation Deck (ex: Edit Mode is permanent, no need to toggle View/Edit mode to make layout changes etc...)
• Existing Observation Deck widgets will by default be available in the new Dashboards experience
• The new Dashboards experience will include all the data-sets that you can add to Kentik: Traffic(Flow), NMS(Metrics), Synthetics, Events...
• The new Dashboards experience will see its Guided Mode powers significantly overhauled and improved to make interactive dashboards a point of focus for creators

Last but not least, we have a long term project to sprinkle AI magic over these new dashboards getting dashboard creation a step closer to true Generative AI!

Tell us what you'd like to see in these future dashboards, it's never to late to get involved in the future of Kentik Portal and we love sourcing our future improvements from our users themselves!

Managing cloud security shouldn't be a guessing game, especially when you need to know exactly why traffic is being blocked or allowed across your AWS environment. We understand how frustrating and time-consuming it can be to troubleshoot these visibility gaps. And that's why we are thrilled to announce that Kentik Cloud now supports the ingestion of AWS Network Firewall (ANF) logs. 

By integrating this service-based firewall data, Kentik provides you with deep observability into traffic moving into, out of, and across your AWS environment, including critical metadata not found in standard VPC flow logs. This integration empowers your team for proactive network security management by bringing enriched ANF flow logs, alert logs, and firewall metrics all into a single view with the most relevant network context from your AWS environment.

• Pinpoint Blocked Traffic: Quickly identify exactly what traffic is being blocked and why, allowing you to make informed decisions to either whitelist legitimate traffic or address unauthorized attempts immediately.
• Add Context to your Security Policies: Gain comprehensive visibility into specific firewalls, policies, and rules. You can now easily see and audit which traffic is traversing specific firewall rulesets to ensure your security posture aligns with your intended policy.
• Streamline Connectivity Analysis: Visualize the network paths across your AWS environment, ensuring that you have clarity on firewalls, security groups, and network ACLs that are all contributing to a potential connectivity blockage.

What's new?

Network firewalls are a critical part of your cloud network architecture, so it was important that we first provide the relevant context about those ANF connections in the Kentik Map. This also provides important metadata about the Firewall Attachments, Firewall Rule Groups, and all of the connections from VPCs, subnets, Transit Gateways, and more. 

For troubleshooting, it was also important that this firewall metadata was also used for path analysis across your AWS network. We added AWS Network Firewall details to Kentik Cloud Pathfinder, including direct links into the AWS Console for firewall rule configuration.

Finally, we wanted to surface the enriched ANF flow and alert log data to ensure that traffic analysis had a first-class experience in Kentik Data Explorer. Now you can use ANF-provided log dimensions along with Kentik's enrichment engine to make it easy to look at specific dropped flows and which VPC, region, and application they come from. 

How do I get started?

Ready to get more out of your AWS Network Firewall visibility? Log in to the Kentik Portal today to enable AWS Network Firewall log ingestion as part of your Kentik Cloud Export. For step-by-step configuration details, check out our Knowledge Base article on integrating AWS Network Firewall logs.

KProxy has long been a trusted ally in maintaining network visibility across complex and restricted environments. As we look toward the future of network intelligence, we are excited to help you scale even further by integrating these proven capabilities into a more unified and automated platform experience.

See What’s New

With last week’s release of Flow Proxy as a native capability within the Kentik Universal Agent, we are now officially setting a sunset date for the standalone KProxy binary: May 1, 2027.

We’re sharing this roadmap a full year in advance to ensure your team has a clear and supported path to the next generation of flow collection. This transition moves the robust traffic forwarding you've relied on into a "set-it-and-forget-it" capability model. By consolidating into the Universal Agent, you’re moving toward a more streamlined, single-agent architecture that simplifies your entire telemetry stack.

Why It Matters

Transitioning to Flow Proxy allows you to leverage a modern, high-performance architecture while building on the reliable foundation KProxy established.

• Unified Agent Management: Instead of managing KProxy as a separate standalone service, you can now handle everything through the Universal Agent. This means one binary to maintain, one service to monitor, and a much cleaner operational footprint.
• UI-Driven Control & Visibility: We’ve moved configuration out of local text files and into the cloud. You can now deploy, tune, and scale your Flow Proxy settings directly from the Kentik Portal, giving you faster response times and better oversight.
• Enhanced Security Standards: The integrated Flow Proxy brings FIPS support to your traffic forwarding. This ensures your telemetry meets the highest security and compliance standards required for modern regulated environments without any additional configuration complexity.

Get Started!

The future of network intelligence is unified, and the path forward is simple. We recommend all users begin migrating their KProxy instances to the Universal Agent Flow Proxy capability to start taking advantage of these integrated features today.

Dive into the KProxy Migration Guide to map out your move, or jump into the Kentik Portal to enable Flow Proxy on your existing Universal Agents. Let’s get your network ready for 2027.

Onboarding network devices shouldn't require a complex flowchart to determine which agent polls for what data. We understand that juggling "NMS devices" versus "Flow devices"—and facing the performance penalty of "double polling" where multiple agents hit the same device—has been a source of friction and unnecessary complexity. 

What’s New?

We’re thrilled to announce a major evolution in how the Kentik Universal Agent (UA) collects device telemetry. Instead of a product-focused "NMS" capability, all SNMP and Streaming Telemetry (ST) collection will be handed by a Unified SNMP/ST capability.

Previously, the Universal Agent’s "NMS" capability focused on full monitoring (as well as ICMP-only devices), while a separate Kproxy agent (outside of the UA) handled SNMP polling for flow enrichment (as well as flow ingest). This often led to redundant polling and confusing configurations when polling devices for both flow enrichment and device monitoring.

The "NMS" capability has evolved into the SNMP/ST capability. This single, powerful capability now handles both Full Monitoring (NMS) and Flow Enrichment. For more details on these distinctions, check out the Detailed Migration Scenarios section of the KProxy Migration Guide. This update works hand-in-hand with our new UA Flow Proxy capability, allowing you to consolidate everything under the Universal Agent framework, eliminating the need for standalone Kproxy installations and streamlining your "Kentik devices" onboarding process.

Why It Matters

This unification isn't just a rename; it is a fundamental architectural improvement designed to reduce overhead and simplify your workflow.

• Eliminate "Double Polling": By consolidating monitoring and enrichment into a single capability, we stop the inefficient practice of having both Kproxy and the Universal Agent poll the same device. This significantly reduces CPU load on your network gear and improves overall performance.
• Simplified Onboarding & Management: We're eroding the need to decide between an "NMS device" or a "Flow device." You simply configure the SNMP/ST capability based on your collection needs. Whether you just need Flow Enrichment (requires Flow license) or Full Monitoring (requires NMS license), it is now handled by a single, logical agent configuration.
• Faster Time to Value: Deploying new devices is faster and less prone to configuration errors. You get immediate visibility without the "support tax" of maintaining disparate agent binaries.

Get Started!

Ready to streamline your device telemetry? For a detailed breakdown of the migration paths and new configuration options—including Flow Enrichment vs. Full Monitoring—check out the KProxy Migration Guide in the Kentik Knowledge Base.

Managing disparate agent binaries across your network shouldn't be a manual chore that slows down or complicates your visibility. We know that deploying agents in remote sites or restricted environments often feels like a balancing act between security requirements and operational simplicity.

What’s New?

We’re thrilled to announce that the power of KProxy is now natively integrated into the Kentik Universal Agent! This update brings the trusted secure traffic forwarding agent you rely on directly into our Universal Agent. Instead of managing standalone KProxy installations via command line, you can now deploy, manage, and scale your flow collection as a simple "capability" within the Universal Agent. This integration allows the agent to receive, process, and forward NetFlow, sFlow, and IPFIX telemetry to the Kentik platform with more control and less friction than ever before.

Why It Matters

This evolution of the Flow Proxy capability isn't just about consolidation; it's about making your life easier and your network more secure.

• Centralized UI Configuration: Say goodbye to manual configuration files. You can now deploy and tune your Flow Proxy settings like listening ports directly from the Kentik Portal.

• FIPS Support for Regulated Environments: For our customers in highly regulated industries, this update introduces FIPS support, ensuring your traffic forwarding meets the stringent security standards required for compliant implementations.
• Simplified Enrichment: Easily associate all flow data with specific Kentik Sites during setup, ensuring your data is organized and actionable the moment it hits the platform.

Get Started!

Ready to streamline your device telemetry? For a detailed breakdown of the migration paths and new Flow Proxy configuration options check out the KProxy Migration Guide in the Kentik Knowledge Base.

Data Explorer has always been the crown jewel of Kentik Portal: by any measure this Observability Analytics workbench is our users' most beloved application. As its grown over time, we've kept adding new functionality to it over the years.

As a byproduct, we've heard feedback from our newer users that this Data Explorer beast could be hard to tame as you're making your first steps in Kentik Portal.

As we were ramping up Kentik's AI capabilities, we discovered very early that AI Advisor does an excellent job as a Natural Language Processor that turns human prompts into fully fledged Data Explorer queries - AI Advisor Announcement here

So to facilitate faster queries in Data Explorer, we've added small, buy highly useful feature to AI Advisor when using AI Advisor on the Data Explorer page: Send to Data Explorer.

Learning to use Data Explorer with AI Advisor

When it comes to users new to Data Explorer, we believe there's nothing more efficient than learning its ropes by example.

Starting today, you'll notice that when AI Advisor writes an answer to the chat window on a Data Explorer page that contains a query it has used for analysis, it will now present a Send to Data Explorer button next to it.

When clicked, the Send to Data Explorer button will replace the current query in the main window with an updated one from this step of the prompt response.
The beauty of it is that users can keep iterating over the same query without ever having to set all the query parameters themselves in the Data Explorer query panel. The additional benefit is that after each iteration, a learning user can precisely look at what parameters AI Advisor changed in the query to respond to their prompt, therefore getting a personalized tutorial on setting up their own query!

Here's a sample follow-up to the previous prompt, which will present the results in a table, but also offer the Send to Data Explorer button

... and the result in the main Data Explorer window when clicking the button

But wait... enter Cause Analysis

While piloting Data Explorer via prompt is already a major improvement in itself, we also linked it to Cause Analysis. If you don't remember this incredible AI feature of Data Explorer, take a minute to read the Cause Analysis feature announcement here.

With Cause Analysis, you can ask Kentik AI to inspect a traffic chart and ask it to identify anomalies and analyze them for you: one of the ways to do so was to drag and highlight a visual anomaly and summon the feature as shown in the screenshot below

With this new feature on display today, you can simply ask AI Advisor "What happened on 04/3 around 15:00", and AI Advisor will spontaneously summon Cause Analysis and give you a Send to Data Explorer button for you to access the result of its reasoning as to what may have caused this peak:

Many enterprises and businesses are looking to integrate AI agents together to standardize workflows and front ends. To help customers achieve that goal and make Kentik data more accessible to other workflows, Kentik AI Advisor now supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling seamless integration with AI agents and development frameworks like Claude Desktop, GitHub Copilot, and others.

What is MCP?

The Model Context Protocol is an emerging industry standard for AI agent access to data and interaction with external systems. It's supported by all major AI agents and development frameworks, making it easy to extend AI capabilities with specialized tools and data sources.

Key Benefits

• Standardized Integration - MCP is becoming the industry standard for AI agent integrations, ensuring broad compatibility and future-proofing your workflows
• Plug & Play Simplicity - Integrate AI Advisor into your existing AI agents and workflows without complex API implementations
• Multi-turn Conversations - Full support for contextual follow-up questions and session management, enabling natural back-and-forth interactions
• Real-time Progress - See AI Advisor's reasoning process in real-time as it analyzes your network

How It Works

The Kentik-hosted MCP server provides tools that enable AI assistants to:

• Ask natural language questions about your network
• Maintain conversation context across multiple questions
• Review full conversation history from any session

Simply configure your MCP-compatible AI agent with your Kentik API credentials and the MCP endpoint:

US Cluster: https://api.kentik.com/mcp
EU Cluster: https://api.kentik.eu/mcp

Required HTTP Headers:

• X-CH-Auth-Email: email@company.com
• X-CH-Auth-API-Token: api-token

Available Tools

The MCP server exposes three core tools:

1. ask_question - Submit a new question to AI Advisor
2. ask_followup - Continue a conversation with follow-up questions
3. get_session_history - Retrieve full conversation history

Example Use Cases

Network questions show up everywhere: incident channels, postmortems, capacity reviews, security investigations. Here are some common ways AI Advisor MCP can help you integrate network intelligence into other places:

• Network Operations - Integrate AI Advisor into your NOC workflows and automation tools
• Custom Dashboards - Build custom interfaces that leverage AI Advisor's intelligence
• Development Workflows - Use AI Advisor directly from your IDE with Claude Code or GitHub Copilot
• Slack Bots - Create custom Slack integrations for team collaboration

Getting Started

Check out our Knowledge Base documentation for detailed setup instructions, including:

• Configuration examples for Claude Desktop, GitHub Copilot, and other MCP clients
• Authentication setup
• Best practices and troubleshooting tips

Questions or feedback? Reach out to your Kentik account team or contact support.

One of the most common steps in investigating a network issue is validating connectivity from the right vantage point—checking whether a destination is reachable, measuring latency or packet loss, and identifying where traffic may be breaking down along the path. Traditionally, that means switching tools to run ping or traceroute, then manually bringing those results back into the troubleshooting process.

With On-demand Connectivity Test, AI Advisor can perform that step for you directly from a Kentik Universal Agent. This keeps the investigation in one place, reduces context switching, and adds another source of real-time diagnostic data that AI Advisor can use alongside other telemetry as it reasons through the problem.

What It Does

The Connectivity Test tool provides Ping and Traceroute diagnostics directly from your private Universal Agents through AI Advisor's conversational interface:

• Ping: Test device connectivity, measure latency, and detect packet loss
• Traceroute: Identify network bottlenecks, points of failure, or routing loops
• Private vantage points: Run tests from your own network locations where Universal Agents are deployed

How to Get Started

Prerequisites:

1. Deploy at least one Universal Agent (Settings » Universal Agents)
2. Install the Connectivity Test capability on the agent:
   • Open the Agent Details drawer
   • Under Capabilities » Available, click Install next to Connectivity Test

Once installed, AI Advisor automatically detects available agents and includes them in its system context (agent names, site locations, etc.).

How to Use It

Simply ask AI Advisor in natural language to test the connectivity to the destinations of interest.

Here are example prompts:

• Test the connectivity to device ABC1
• Ping 8.8.8.8 with 5 packets
• Traceroute to 147.91.1.120
• Check if we can reach our DNS server from the Boston office
• Run a traceroute from our London agent to 1.1.1.1

AI Advisor will:

1. Select the appropriate Universal Agent(s)
2. Execute the ping or traceroute test
3. Display results with success/failure indicators
4. Interpret ICMP responses and provide actionable insights

Key Benefits

On-Demand Connectivity Tests help teams investigate issues more efficiently by combining real-time diagnostics with the broader network context already available in AI Advisor. Because these diagnostics run inside AI Advisor and remain part of the investigation, they can improve both the speed and quality of troubleshooting in several ways:

• Context-aware: AI Advisor knows your agent locations and can suggest the best vantage point
• Conversational troubleshooting: No need to SSH into servers or use separate tools
• Multi-agent support: Can run tests from multiple agents simultaneously for comparison
• Integrated analysis: Correlate connectivity results with flow data, metrics, alerts, and other telemetry
• Faster MTTR: Quickly validate reachability during incident investigations

Ready to try it? Quickly install Universal Agent's Connectivity Test and start testing with AI Advisor!

As we've noticed, almost every time a table with data inside is displayed within Kentik Portal, it invariably takes no time before our users ask for it to be downloadable in a CSV format.
Additionally, AI Advisor very often displays results in a table format, because it is one of the most legible ways for our users to efficiently parse that data.

Hence, we've taught AI Advisor to display a Download CSV action button with any and every data table it displays.
This could be the end of the product announcement, but read on, it gets even more interesting.

Spreadsheets, day in to day out

If you work in the computer or networking industry, you can certainly confirm first hand that one of the most routine tasks we all end up performing every day is some variant of this sequence of actions:

1. Get some data from a SaaS tool
2. Download said data
   1. If you're lucky and the tool has the capability, export to CSV/XLSX
   2. If you're not copy it from the browser into a spreadsheet (comes with the customary prayer that it will format fine through pasting)
3. Massage the data to make it presentable to an audience

Rinse and repeat, all day every day including weekends.

Enter AI Advisor

As we are all making more and more room for AI Advisor to boost productivity, the aforementioned loop gets less taxing, thanks to this new Download CSV button mentioned earlier. Just take a look at the example below where I'm asking AI Advisor to give me a list of the top inbound ASN to my network by traffic:

We could call it a day and close the product announcement here, but I really wanted to make it worth your read here, so bear with for another paragraph, will you?

Cranking it up a notch

As mentioned earlier, there's always some amount of massaging you'll want to do on tabular data before presenting it to someone else.
The previous example is no exception. Right now I'm getting a table with the following columns 1) rank 2) AS Name, 3) Avg Traffic.

What if I wanted to:

• display the ASN registration country in its own column for further filtering, and in a way that's human readable
• add a link on each row to the peeringDB record for each network (arcane knowledge, you can reach the PeeringDB page of any ASN via this URL format: https://peeringdb.com/asn/ )

Let's go.

I know, you're welcome 😉

Not so long ago, we released an update to Kentik Portal's Search Engine that gave it AI Superpowers. Since then, the Search Engine has been able to point users to any screen in Kentik Portal based on any question pertaining to a task they want to perform, such as "Where can I track my IP Transit spend?" or "How can I monitor my backbone link capacity?". In order to deliver this feature we've built an AI module that feeds off a complete SiteMap of the Portal and knows what each module on any URL does, and what its entry pointer in the Knowledge Base is.

We've extended this feature to our beloved AI Advisor for it to gain new abilities, read on.

"AI Advisor, please help!"

Given our ever-increasing product surface, we wanted to make it easier for new users to hit the ground running. Often, someone will make a note of certain portal functionalities during a trial period that they will want to implement later in their deployment of the product, but forget where in the Kentik Portal it exists or how to implement them. This usually results in getting to the outcomes you want slower.

Sometimes, a user will need to dig into how a certain computation is made, or why Kentik Portal is making specific determinations.

This is where this feature shines: on any screen in Kentik Portal, you can now ask AI Advisor to explain to you how a certain screen works, just as how you would ask your Customer Success advisor.
AI Advisor will then fetch the relevant data from the SiteMap, link it to relevant Knowledge Base article and give you a crash course on how the screen you're currently looking at works. Basically, you can ask Kentik to explain how it works. We believe that this will significantly help with the timeliness to answer to our user's question about the product, and more durably unblock them in the pursuit of operating their infrastructure with our platform.

As you will discover in the examples that follow, contrary to a lot of AI Assistants, AI Advisor just does not dump help links on the user. It answers in precise, summarized terms to questions related to functionality and how it works under the hood.

A simple example with Connectivity Costs

As you can see in the screenshot below, AI Advisor now includes the additional step in its reasoning to summon the SiteMap tool

Landing on a screen and asking what it does and how it works is now a trivial operation, for instance on the Connectivity Costs workflow screen:

...leading to a follow-up conversation of how it works:

Another example, this time with Kentik Market Intelligence

Another example, directly taken from the Kentik Market Intelligence page, as it is one of our more niche products - expectedly not all users are fully aware of what marvels it performs

... where a follow-up interaction would most likely be around "How do we establish a score to rank networks against each others", again successfully clarified by AI Advisor

...which begs the follow-up question around the different Retail, Wholesale and Backbone types of scores, for which AI Advisor will even compose an explanatory diagram on the fly:

AI Advisor gets smarter every day, so don't be shy, ask it anything !

These examples are all but a tiny fraction of how AI Advisor can supercharge your life of managing infrastructure -- and we're adding new capabilities to it every day.
This is the simplest, most straightforward way for you to start on the journey to faster results and outcomes from Kentik: next time, right before you contact our amazing Customer Success team of advisors, give AI Advisor a prompt and see what it answers, you may be surprised ;)