As a network intelligence platform, one of the areas that we often try to help customers understand is their flow volume. Sampling is a critical part of that calculation, as it affects your data resolution and how confidently you can slice and dice the data to make decisions. Our flow-based pricing model is setup to protect you, the customer, from getting penalized for traffic spikes that might take you over your plan's Max FPS. After speaking with many users, we found that Kentik needed to provide more transparency when sampling was happening, so that you can adjust device sampling, pak size, and maintain the level of data accuracy that you expect in Kentik. 

As we made changes to the product, primarily as part of the Licenses page where your plans are laid out, we also included some updates to:

a) Flow Licenses - to show you which plans (FlowPak, CloudPak, DevicePak) have significant downsampling, potentially due to device configuration or under-licensing

b) NMS Licenses - to more clearly reflect your device counts and limits

c) Device Flow and Downsampling indicators - to allow you to filter and view devices that may be sending more flow than you expect, or to use AI Advisor to identify and suggest remediations

d) Cloud FPS and Sampling configuration - to allow you to view raw FPS in your cloud environment before Kentik-configured sampling

Understanding your Licenses

You'll notice a few changes to your Licenses page for Traffic plans (FlowPak, DevicePak), CloudPak plans, and NMS (NPak). Firstly, we wanted to provide more visibility to downsampled devices. This includes links to the Devices page with the relevant devices highlighted.

Secondly, we wanted to provide a better understanding of sampling ratios and FPS measures, especially for AWS & Azure cloud exports that support an additional export-configured sampling. We included similar graphs for Traffic FlowPaks as below, to show the trend of received FPS and stored FPS over time. These underlying metrics are also available in Metrics Explorer under /kentik/licensing/flow measurements.

Finally, we wanted to clearly show which NMS devices were onboarded as Full-monitor Devices vs. ICMP-only, so that you can clearly track your device counts as you onboard and grow your network. 

Don't double-downsample Devices

We also wanted to extend this transparency within the Licenses page to other parts of the Kentik product by surfacing the same FPS indicators and flow telemetry. We added additional filters to the Devices table and Flow status indicators, in addition to also supporting this same context in AI Advisor.

We also added more of this data in the Telemetry tab for the device, including a historical view of received FPS and stored FPS for the past 30 days.

That's a lot of Cloud flow

Understanding flow volume in your Cloud environment is a consistent pain point, so we wanted to add additional visibility there, too. Now, as part of your Public Clouds settings, you can see a breakdown of flow volumes across the various cloud exports that you have configured. Kentik supports customizable sampling ratios for AWS & Azure cloud exports, allowing you to adjust the number of flows that you send to Kentik for storage. (While GCP & OCI support sampling natively, we also surface your configured sampling ratios in the export table.)

We hope that this added visibility enables you to maintain the level of data accuracy that you desire in Kentik as your network traffic grows! As always, please don't hesitate to reach out to us to provide feedback anytime.