The largest and most obvious change we made this month was the rollout of Kentik Detect v3.1, which introduces our new Library section of the portal. If you’ve logged in recently you probably noticed the announcement in a popup that appears at login. The Library gives you a single page from which to create, view, modify, and manage views of your network traffic data. It’s a big step forward in our effort to streamline your workflow when using the portal, and it will enable us to rapidly develop a rich array of preset views for specific use cases.

While the Library replaces the portal’s separate Dashboard and Saved Views pages, all of your existing dashboards and saved views have been preserved and are now available in a central location. Access the Library via the main navbar, then use the sidebar to choose views that have been created within your organization or provided by Kentik. 

You’ll be able to move quickly between different views, and to easily edit views, modify properties, and clone existing views to make variations. Learn more about the details in the following Knowledge Base articles:

• Portal Library
• Using the Library

Users can now make the Library their default landing page via the Default Settings pane of the User Profile (accessed via the drop-down menu at the far right of the main portal navbar).

Focus on Ease-of-Use

The Library is the latest example of our focus on portal ease-of-use, which we’ve mentioned in previous updates. The idea is to empower the consumers of information via dashboards and saved views (created by both power users and consumers). The Library also enables us to release Kentik-provided preset views that address specific use cases. The Library’s consumer-focussed UI supports this goal with the following design features:

• Persistent access: The Library tab is always available for direct access to dashboards and saved views. The list includes views that you’ve designated as favorites and also those that you’ve recently viewed.
• 
  Ubiquitous search: A search popup (shown at right) that launches from the main navbar means that you can quickly find views wherever you are in the portal. 
• Content organization: Views in the Library can be assigned to categories and are grouped into buckets (personal, company-shared, and Kentik presets). 
• Content discovery: The Library landing page gives us the ability to promote new and featured views, organized by task-specific categories or consumer teams.

The new Library is only one aspect of our recent usability efforts. Some additional steps include:

• Adding dimensions that enable characterization of network traffic, e.g. Interface Classifiers and Network Classifiers.
• Upping the portal’s visualization game with new view types (Gauge, Geo HeatMap) and making data more visually useful with Bracketing (application of colors based on value range).
• Bringing interactivity to dashboards via guided-mode dashboards and dashboard navigation (drill down to deeper views).

More usability enhancements are slated for release in coming months, so keep an eye on this space…