Autonomous systems (ASes) represent the networks that collectively make up the Internet and enable the use of BGP to compute routes for the delivery of traffic. With our new AS Groups feature we allow you to assign one or more AS to a group that you name so that you can view traffic from a set of ASes as if they were a single entity.

There are several scenarios in which this ability to control how ASes are represented in query results may be useful to the operator of a network:

• Logical grouping of ASes – ISPs that are part of a broader consortium may have multiple ASes spanning multiple countries. AS grouping gives you the ability to assess the traffic from a multi-AS organization as a single entity, which is particularly important for interconnection/capacity planners in the context of peering.
• Mapping of existing AS labels – Many organizations refer to ASes with labels that are distinct from the official name of the AS. An AS group may be used to associate an existing label with one or more ASes, so that the AS naming by which ASes are represented in Kentik Detect can be made consistent with the AS naming that you already use in other systems.
• Naming by internal topology – It’s now common in modern, large-scale data centers to deploy Clos architecture, which relies on BGP to the rack, with each rack corresponding to its own private ASN. AS groups enable you to reference and visualize groups of private ASes in a way that reflects this Clos-based datacenter topology.

As shown here, Kentik Detect users with Admin access can find the AS Groups page either from the Admin landing page, in the Enrich Your Data pane, or via the popout sidebar on all Admin pages.

Managing AS Groups

The AS Groups page allows users to configure/add groups of ASes, either private or public. If a group includes just one AS then the group’s name will simply override Kentik’s default name for that AS.

The use of AS groups has the following effect on Kentik Detect queries:

• Group-by - If at least one AS group has been configured in your organization then the Use AS Groups switch will be present in the Advanced Options section of the Query pane in the Data Explorer sidebar. When the switch is on (default) and the group-by dimensions include Destination AS or Source AS, the results from all ASes in a given group will be summed for top-X evaluation, graph plotting, and display in the results table (as shown below, a group icon will appear at the left of the group name). In this context, no additional dimension is needed to use AS groups.

• Filtering - Inclusion or exclusion of traffic from a given AS group may be achieved by setting that group as the value of a filter on the dimension AS Group, as shown below.

For more on the AS Groups feature, please see the AS Groups article in the Kentik Knowledge Base or contact the Kentik Customer Success team at support@kentik.com.