Latest features, improvements, and product updates on Kentik's Network Observability platform.
We are happy to announce the support for the Google Cloud firewalls for Kentik Cloud.
For customers looking for an easy and simple way to check and troubleshoot connectivity inside GCP and see what type of traffic is being denied by the configured firewall rules, we show that under the "Details" sidebar for every VPC.
We added a new dimension for the Data Explorer, allowing customers to use the Subscription name to identify traffic flows and create alerts and dashboards.
Previously only Subscription ids were used for that purpose, and that’s not ideal, as ids are not easily humanly readable and are machine-generated.
This quarter we started working on supporting the OCI cloud.
The first iteration of the work will include the cloud map showing all the basic OCI cloud networking objects, such as regions, VCN (OCI equivalent of VPC), Subnets, On-prem assets, and VPN links.
Kentik is happy to announce new support for AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) flow logs.
Many customers prefer to rely on TGW flow logs instead of VPC flow logs as the primary source of traffic information about their AWS environments.
A Transit Gateway typically interconnects different VPCs and other gateways (Direct Connect, VPNs, etc.) In this case, the TGW sits at a central point of a customer’s AWS network, observing all the traffic passing through, and can serve as a single flow log generation point. For many customers, that should reduce the cost of flow log generation, and allow for analysis and detection of performance-impacting issues that span multiple environments.
Previous Kentik Cloud releases required customers to enable flow logs at the VPC level for every monitored VPC. That often led to duplication of flow data, as one flow can be observed across many VPCs, generating the same flow record in each. Since AWS charges customers for the volume of the flow records generated, this added unnecessary cost.
Some VPCs may still require enablement of flow log generation at the VPC level to see traffic that may not go through the TGW; for example, when VPC-to-VPC peering is configured, or when Direct Connect or VPN terminates inside the VPC rather than a TGW.
Please contact your CSE or account team with any questions you have.
We are happy to announce that the Azure Express route is supported for your Data Explorer queries.
With the help of new dimensions such as ExpressRoute Circuit name, ExpressRoute Peering Type, as well as Gateway Type, which will support Express Route Gateways as a value, you will be able to use Data Explorer and filter out traffic flows that are going through the particular Express Route Circuit.
This feature will be handy not just in troubleshooting when something doesn’t work but also for:
Currently, we support standalone Express Routes that are terminated in VNET. Support for Express Routes terminated on vWAN Hubs is coming soon!
We are excited to announce Version 1.0 of Kentik Map for GCP, which provides an analogous experience to the AWS and Azure maps in Cloud.
While the concept is largely the same, there are some differences in the GCP map organization compared to our AWS and Azure maps based on the way resources are organized in GCP.
For example, in contrast to the AWS topology map, which groups VPCs by region, the GCP map groups regions by VPC. Each region has its subnets listed beneath it.
The searchable GCP map displays traffic and routing data for the resources shown. We enable support for historical views back into your topology and metadata in GCP.
Visualizations from the GCP map include:
In the coming months, we will continue building GCP observability to achieve parity with our AWS and Azure offerings, adding functionality such as security group support.
Our platform aims to provide customers full support for all clouds with a consistent user experience. Kentik Cloud abstracts away the differences in cloud network interfaces to maintain cohesive multi-cloud workflows in the Kentik Portal.
Setup instructions for the GCP Map are here in our Knowledge Base.
We are excited to announce support for a historical look back into your topology and metadata that will help you to monitor your cloud infrastructure more efficiently.
It is easier now to keep track of changes in your topology and metadata, such as VNETs, gateways, vWAN hubs, and Express Routes and their connections. You can use the map feature to quickly see what has changed without digging through logs or reports. It also provides a visual representation of your cloud topology at any historical moment, making it easy to spot any changes made.
We hope this new feature makes it easier for you to keep track of your cloud environment and ensure it runs smoothly. If you have any questions about Azure Cloud Map support for historical view, don't hesitate to contact our customer support team. We are here to help!
We are happy to announce the support for the Azure vWAN service in Kentik Maps and Data Explorer, with dimensions for vWAN hubs.
On Kentik Maps, vWAN components are shown in two places:
In addition, Data Explorer now has Ingress and Egress Virtual Hub dimensions that allow you to see precisely which virtual hubs were used by your traffic flow on their way to their destination.
vWAN service support will be a significant aid in troubleshooting your global cloud network deployments.
We released a new configuration knob that allows customers to change the sampling rate for AWS and Azure on their own without contacting Kentik team.
That will allow customers to consume flow logs at the preferred rate fitting into the licensing strategy, assigning priority for certain types of traffic and being flexible by changing the sampling rate at any time and separately for each flow log exporter.
Licensing will be enforced after the sampling, so customers can use heavier sampling in some cases, and saving the licensed FPS for the another S3 buckets containing flow logs.
There is a slight difference in available options for AWS and Azure.
Historically Kentik was supporting a “legacy” mode of sampling where for the large files with flow logs we were randomly picking 10,000 flow records per file in S3 bucket and ingesting only those records into Kentik Data Engine. Since the number of the flow in a file can vary this was considered an “adaptive sampling” where larger files were getting more heavily sampled comparing to the smaller files. Another option was no sampling i.e. all the records were consumed from the file.
Moving forward we now support 3 options for AWS:
Sampling rate can be configured when new flow log file is added, or changed for the existing exporter.
Flow log exporters for Azure before this release were supporting only Unsampled mode, where all the flows from the flow log file were processed by the Kentik Data Engine.
Since for some situations full flow log visibility might be not required, we added sampling knob that allows users to configure sampling rate 1:N format (meaning 1 out N records to be picked up for an ingest into Kentik Data Engine), where N should be between 2 and 2000.
Customers who are using Azure tags within their cloud infrastructure can import those tags into Kentik and use them as a Custom Dimensions within Kentik Data Explorer.
This import can be configure as any other Custom Dimensions configuration, under Settings - Custom Dimensions - Add Custom Dimensions
After that user is able to pick up which Azure Entities will be used to generate the Custom Dimensions from:
After Kentik will populate custom dimensions that were chosen (can take up to 30 min), they became fully available in a Data Explorer, under the section “Custom”.
Note: other custom dimensions are shown on the picture as well. Dimension that was generated from Azure tag is highlighted.
We also wanted to use this opportunity and remind that AWS tags are supported as Custom Dimensions as well 🙂.
Happy flow hunting!