By popular demand, we've added a new dimension named Site Market in Kentik Portal. It allows our users to group sites within Markets and use this new dimension in all parts of the product to filter, or group by.

When is this feature useful?

We've heard many times the situation where having multiple PoPs in the same metropolitan area makes it difficult to pivot Guided Mode dashboards around.
For instance, it is not uncommon that large networks have multiple PoPs around Los Angeles, say LAX1, LAX2, ..., LAXN. Most of the time these networks want to consider all of these as a single Metro: enters Site Markets, slap a "Los Angeles Metro" Site Market Label on all of these and you can now use it as a Dashboard Guide Mode parameter !

With its Ultimate Exit Site Market, and its special "Site Market doesn't equal Ultimate Exit Site Market" large networks are going to be able to perform useful queries telling them when traffic form one of their peers isn't hot-potato'ed and carried at higher cost over long distances. 

How can I configure the feature?

You can navigate to Settings > Manage Sites where you'll notice the new Site Market attribute. You can create a new Site Market on the spot or pick an already existing one.

From the Manage Sites screen, you can even Bulk assign Site Market to sites, which obviously comes in handy the first time you discover the feature.

When first configuring your Site Markets, you can also leverage the filters on the Site screen to quickly select all those without a Site Market, which together with the aforementioned feature really helps moving faster.

The Manage Site Markets screen

Additionally, Site Markets now have their own Settings screen, which can be found here:

Custom Geos vs Site Markets

There is a misleading parallel between Custom Geos and Site Markets, so let's take a look at these:

• Custom Geos: map a Source Geo and Destination Geobased on
  • GeoIP data from Source IP and Destination IP
    and
    Custom Geo to Country mapping from the Custom Geo user configuration
• Site Markets: map a Site Market based on
  • Site to Site Market mapping from the Site Market user configuration

The main differences are:

• Site Market is a superset of Sites when Custom Geo is a superset of countries
• Site Market is not directional (green column in Data Explorer's dimension selector), while Custom Geo exists in Source and Destination variants

Using Site Markets

Site Market dimensions are available in both Data Explorer Dimensions and Filters, and come with their "Ultimate Exit" pendent: Ultimate Exit Site Market is mapped from Ultimate Exit Site using the users' Site Market groupings from the configuration screen.

Finally, the Site Market filter comes with a very useful operand saying "Site Market doesn't equal Ultimate Exit Site Market" which will help networks identify traffic that does not stay local (and is therefore more expensive to transit - we trust this feature will be very useful to large Service Provider networks.

Enjoy and let us know what you think about the feature!