February 2022 comes with a broad set of Kentik Cloud improvements. Google VPC Flow Logs now include GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) dimensions, users can now post their own AWS metadata using a newly created ingest API (instead of allowing Kentik to retrieve it via AMI assumption), dissociate the accounts used to collect Flow Logs vs Cloud Metadata, and last but not least, the Kappa agent for Kubernetes celebrated its 1.0 version !

Google Kubernetes Engine dimensions

Kentik Data Explorer now supports Google’s extended flow logs for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) environments. Google extended their VPC Flow Logs to include annotations that describe network traffic inside the Google Kubernetes Engine environment – i.e, the pods, services, nodes, etc. After hearing from a customer who needed this capability inside Kentik, our engineering team added support for these new dimensions.

AWS Agentless Ingest

Kentik Cloud users can now choose how they want to send their cloud data (VPC flow logs and AWS metadata) to Kentik. This helps solve a problem for some who couldn’t allow Kentik to reach into their AWS accounts via an IAM role assumption. We have exposed a REST API to which you can manually post AWS metadata and we can provide a Kentik-hosted S3 bucket to which VPC flow logs can be written or replicated.

Improved Metadata-only onboarding/settings

It’s now easier to configure an AWS cloud export to collect only metadata from a given account/region. Now that we’ve made this simpler, anyone should be able to understand how to configure such environments.

Enhanced kappa agent for Kubernetes

Kentik has released version 1.0 of the eBPF-based kappa agent for Kubernetes network performance and telemetry. Improvements in this version include easier deployment, critical performance telemetry (% Retransmit and % Out of Order Packets), and host metadata reporting.