This update focuses on this very specific set of Cloud related dimensions that our Network Flow users have been asking improvements on when it comes to Data Explorer:

Keep reading if you use these enrichments in Kentik for your Networking Device flow telemetry.

What the problem was

If you are a current user of these dimensions (and it would be surprising if your Network didn't receive or send traffic to or from any of the Public Cloud Providers out there), you probably already know that the values displayed in these dimensions correspond to a text string containing:

• the Cloud Region
• the Region Availability Zone index
• sometimes an indication of which function/component of the Public Cloud Provider this flow record is associated with

This matching is based on reading the Netflow(Sflow, IPFIX) Source or Destination IP and matching it to public data-feeds from the leading cloud providers which contain a Region/Zone/Function to IP Ranges mappings.
One example of value that these dimensions can yield would be:

In this case we're looking at traffic coming from two Public Cloud Providers (AWS and Azure) into your network, with AWS traffic from eu-west-2 and eu-central-1 and Azure Traffic coming from westus-2

If you have multiple entries here, you may want to only look at traffic from AWS EU-West (all zones included), or just from AWS EU (all regions and zones included), which was previously impossible because the only filter operand on these dimensions was Equals.

The improvement we came up with

The filter operands available for these dimensions now include two different match types: Contains and Matches Regex which instantly grants our users a whole lot more flexibility.
If they now desire to filter for AWS traffic from all Zones in EU-West, they can now filter this way

... and obtain a query result such as the one below

Now combining it with the power of our Data Explorer Filter Based Dimensions - if they so desire they can construct their own dimensions based on filters

To obtain the below useful chart, that was previously not achievable