Kentik Market Intelligence gets a couple useful improvements added.

KMI will now let you export rankings and customer/provider lists as a CSV file.
Additionally, we've added a "density chart" on top of the KMI landing page before the ranking table.

The  KMI landing page has been updated with what we call a Density Chart: the usual table-chart we all know and love did not really convey the idea of the actual distance between consecutive networks in the ranking. This new widget has been added on top of the ranking table and places Networks on the line based on how far they are from each other in terms of KMI score.
(check out this article out if you want to understand how KMI score are computed)

Based on popular demand from our KMI customers, we've added a functionality to download the CSV data from both the landing page, and any given network's detail page:

KMI is a new service provider workflow that uses the global routing table to classify the peering and transit relationships between ASes and to identify the providers, peers, and customers for any AS in any geography. KMI estimates the volume of IP space transited by ASes in different geographies and produces rankings based on that volume, thereby enabling users to compare ASes in various markets.

This new workflow is available to all Kentik users with Premier Edition or with the service provider add-on available for the Kentik Pro Edition. This new workflow does not require any configuration and is immediately usable, as it relies on public routing data from a large number of BGP vantage points all around the world.

As routing data gets crunched on a daily basis, it can now be consumed via a simple interface allowing our users to decrypt how networks are connected to each other, what any network’s customer base looks like or what their providers and peers are.

KMI uses the global routing table to classify the peering and transit relationships between ASes and to identify the providers, peers, and customers for any AS in any geography.

Additionally, KMI scores and ranks any network against the size of their customer base in any subdivision of markets, as well as per customer base type such as retail, wholesale or backbone. KMI can now serve as a public, neutral and objective benchmark to score and rank all networks.

Here are a few pointers to get you started with KMI:

• Product page: Kentik Market Intelligence
• Blog post: Launching a labor of love, Kentik Market Intelligence
• Press release: Kentik Market Intelligence launches to benchmark the internet
• Knowledge Base article: Details about how the neutral, objective scoring and ranking algorithm works

In the back scenes, Kentik's OTT Service Tracking workflow leverages an engine, aptly named True Origin. This engine correlates DNS Query/Response data with network telemetry to provide a scalable, affordable DPI-lite type of service.
You can learn more about it here.

While this is something that we rarely spend time talking about, our OTT detection engine, a broadband provider’s favorite, keeps on learning and evolving as time goes by, and the amount of DNS hostname patterns that it is able to detect the underlying service for keeps on increasing constantly.

Over the month of October 2021, the True Origin engine has learned to classify an additional ~1,000 new hostname patterns to match flow with DNS queries. This month, its improvements were centered around Vietnam, Denmark, Sweden and Germany.

Kentik has always supported metric options to count unique source and destination IPs in each row of a query response. We’ve now added a new metric that shows the average bit rate (Mbps) per unique IP. This metric is particularly useful to examine if and when an issue is arising. Here are a couple of examples:

• Find the Average Mbps per Destination towards subscribers in a specific last mile aggregate of their traffic. The aggregate can be easily described in a Custom Dimension matching traffic based on a set of CMTS or DSLAM local loop aggregators, or even more simply just a Site.
• To look at traffic towards subscribers for a given Internet Access Plan. The Plan aggregation level can also be a Custom Dimension based on CIDRs. In this case, users are assigned to specific CIDRs in the IPAM based on their plan.

This “Bitrate Per IP” can be found in the Data Explorer under both “Source IPs” and “Destination IPs”:

This feature works best when paired with Kentik’s ability to detect Over The Top (OTT) services, to display Average/Max/95-99p of the Bitrate for each individual OTT service. For video-based OTT services, we now have a scalable way to calculate Average Bitrate across subscriber sets. As a result, ISPs are now able to track subscriber experience for important content sources.

Let’s look at an example content provider (OTT Service) that has their own CDN and also embeds caches within the ISP network. We’ll compare performance (Mbps per subscriber) for traffic sourced from On-Net Caches vs the OTT service’s CDN.

First, we use filters to set these criteria:

Second, we’ll use a Filter-Based Dimension to compare two time series: Traffic from embedded local caches vs Traffic served from the Content Provider’s own Network and off-net caches (i.e., long-tail content):

Lastly, we’ll select the new “95th Bitrate by Destination IP” metric:

The resulting chart below clearly confirms the assumption that the video traffic coming from On-Net Embedded Caching Servers has a higher Bitrate than the long tail traffic coming from Off-Net Caching Servers in Content Provider’s CDN.

For more information, please contact our Customer Success team.