"Portal won't even load for me," said the SRE manager, Jim-bob, frantically looking at a series of alerts cascading through his observability tool. In the Slack war room, the pressure was mounting. 

"Is this a synth issue or a network issue?" he asked—the classic question that marks the beginning of every high-stakes triage.

Across the virtual table, Ally, the network architect, was digging into the charts. "Why so many that say Tokyo?" she muttered, staring at a sea of overlapping lines. The team was drowning in raw data, but they were missing the story.

What's New?

To solve these high-pressure moments, we’re thrilled to announce the enhanced Investigative Capabilities of AI Advisor (AIA). AI Advisor now has the power to act as your primary on-call investigator, correlating Synthetics monitoring with real-time BGP telemetry. Instead of you manually hunting for common denominators across different ephemeral queries or consoles, AIA looks at your global agent network, analyzes the routing paths, and builds a definitive root-cause report and complete with path visualizations, directly in the chat.

Why It Matters

This update turns AIA into a collaborative partner that solves the "unknown network change" by following the evidence:

• AI Assisted Triangulation: During the triage, Ally and Jim-bob were overwhelmed by "Tokyo" alerts. AIA cut through the noise by identifying that geographically diverse agents (Cloud-A/Chicago, Cloud-B/Tokyo, Cloud-C/London) all shared one thing in common: their traffic routed through a specific upstream transit path. AIA can now build these path-dependency diagrams on the fly, helping describe transit-layer issues in a context that is easier for NOC and network engineers to understand and act upon.
• Exposing the "Connected Route" Trap: One of the most dangerous false signals is a healthy P2P link. AI Advisor identified that while an upstream p2p interface remained reachable with 0% packet loss, it was a "false friend." Because that subnet was a connected route, the link stayed up even as the provider’s backbone lost the ability to route traffic to Kentik's actual service prefixes (193.177.*.*/24). AIA accurately identified that the physical wire was fine, but the routing was broken.

• Correlating BGP Churn in Real-Time: AI Advisor doesn't just look at pings; it looks across the data you’ve collected with Kentik. In our case, it identified a massive BGP UPDATE storm of 158k messages, roughly 148x the normal churn rate, detected on a specific transit path. By linking this routing instability directly to the Synthetics packet loss, AI Advisor (AIA) gives you the data-driven evidence you need to coordinate with partners and resolve path-specific issues.

*note this image is an anonymized recreation based on the original

• Depth Without the Drama: No more fighting with your dashboard while on the move. The updated UDE Table Renderers ensure that whether you're at a dual-monitor workstation or triaging on the go like Jim-Bob, the critical path data and cloud provider info are front and center.

Get Started! Ready to find your Mean Time to Innocence? Head to the Synthetics section in the Kentik portal to explore the new trace tool, or ask AI Advisor to "analyze the latest packet loss spike" to see the triangulation diagram in action. For a deep dive into the technical specs, visit our Knowledge Base.