The Incident Log has been enhanced with some powerful new features.

The log now supports a time series stacked bar chart displaying the volume of alerts by alert severity. This enables users to quickly identify alerting trends over time.

The log also supports many new filtering options that allow the log and the stacked bar chart to be filtered by alert severity, alert status, test name, test type, label and agent (private/global).

When one or more filters are selected an indicator displays the total number of filters currently enabled along with the time range selection.

The selection is also persistent, so navigating away from this page will not cause the selection to be lost.

Finally, we will be collapsing the Performance Dashboard menu item into the Synthetics title itself. 

Clicking on "Synthetics >" will bring you to the (soon to be) newly named "Synthetics Dashboard"

Today, we just released a significant update to the way Kentik users will share the Kentik network observability experience, inside and outside of the company.

We have taken a set of horizontal features and have grouped them into consistent UX patterns for sharing Kentik content, whether these are reports, public snippets or even subscriptions. Read on!

What’s new?

With this update, we’ve centralized the Sharing functionality and streamlined the way it is presented on all screens of the UI/UX. As explained earlier, this creates a more holistic approach to sharing data from Kentik inside and outside.

This includes multiple areas of work, detailed in the sections below.

A redesigned, streamlined Share button on every screen

Extending the subscription capabilities to many more screens

Historically, subscriptions were only available for dashboards, we wanted to do more to meet Kentik users “where they live”.
We extended subscriptions to a discrete set of screens/workflows, with the intent of furthering this list in the future. Subscriptions are available immediately for the following items (we followed our users and their feature requests to make a determination on which to work on first):

• Dashboards
  We’ve added a few under the hood goodies such as the ability to treat carriage returns properly in subscription email messages, as well as offering another previously unavailable frequency: “Last Day of the Month” (useful to vet connectivity invoices at the end of the month)
  
  
• Saved Views
  Subscriptions were not available for Saved Views previously. They are now.
  
  
• Connectivity Costs
  We’re offering here a compelling subset of functionality, 4 types of subscriptions can be configured: Summary (corresponding to the summary screen), Provider(s), Site(s) and Connectivity Type(s).
  Each one of the non summary subscriptions allows Admins to configure which set of Providers/Sites/Connectivity Types to configure these subscriptions for to bundle in one delivery.
  
  
• Capacity Planning
  As for Connectivity costs, users can now subscribe to a summary (aka front page) or a subset of Capacity Plans.

Extending the CSV export functionalities to many more screens/workflows

A significant number of non-technical users have requested (via FRs) to be able to download CSV data for some of the most used workflows, and be able to massage it further into their own reporting.

Additional CSV exports available

First and foremost, CSV report download is now available in these workflows/screens

• Saved views

• Connectivity Costs

  • All connectivity costs
  • Per provider
  • Per site
  • Per connectivity type

• Capacity Planning

  • All plans details
  • Any number of plans together in a single CSV

• Kentik Market Intelligence

  • Rankings CSV
  • Customer and Provider CSV for any given network

To further streamline the experience, all reports download actions are now located in the exact same location, regardless to the screen the user is on, that is within the [Action] button as it initially was for Data Explorer.

CSV downloads now available for subscriptions

Not only have these CSV capabilities been extended, but they are now also available in subscriptions, which answers multiple Feature Requests we had had on Capacity Planning and Connectivity Costs.

Below is an example of a Connectivity Cost report being sent 

• for Transit and Paid Private Peering
• As a CSV spreadsheet
• The Last day of the month

Multiple convenience UX changes to make this feature set work better

Settings + relocating Public Link Shares

While initially in the Navigation panel, Public Shares have now been moved together to the Settings screen, in their own “Share” panel to the right, bundled together as a cohesive functional unit:

Subscriptions & Sharing features in Library

1. Library now gives a clear indication of when a given Saved View or Dashboard is involved in a subscription: the underlying goal is for admins to know before modifying a view that other users may be relying on it.
   
   
   
2. Users can also now both subscribe and unsubscribe directly to a Saved View or Dashboard from the library by using the contextual actions:
   

Once Public Sharing is finalized for Saved Views and Dashboards (currently ongoing), a similar marker will be displayed.

Redesigned Report Subscriptions management screen

As displayed in the previous screenshots, the Report Subscriptions UI can now be accessed directly from the Sharing Modal, as displayed below:

The Report Subscriptions management screen has been significantly updated and now offers all the convenience features that our usual list screens offer, such as the search panel on the left.

Amongst the very useful items, Users can now quickly identify using filters:

• Subscriptions that they are recipients of
• Subscriptions that have non-kentik account emails in them (aka Shared Externally)

These two situations being potential data exfiltration threats, the UI allows Kentik Admins to identify them easily.

Subscription Auto-Sense at share time

As users ideally want to limit the amount of email subscriptions being created around the same screen/workflow/report, the sharing modal performs some amount of magic:

If a subscription already exist when the user hits the [Share] button and goes to the Subscription tab, the Subscription Title entry will offer to either

• Modify an existing subscription
  OR
• To create a new one

Sample share screen displaying the choice between "Create New subscription" vs "Edit Existing Subscription"

At Kentik, we believe that the future is insights and automation to empower humans—not replace them.

Kentik V4 focuses on proactive insights—both system-driven and custom user-defined, as well as interactive insights driven by humans. The new Quick Views offer convenient, built-in interactive visualizations for fast access to the most-used views. Custom Views & Data Explorer allow users to answer more sophisticated, interactive questions about the network—instantly—and at the full resolution as the data is collected.

V4 also makes managing networks significantly easier by adding use-case-specific workflows. This dramatically improves the learning curve for onboarding new networks, devices, and capabilities. We’ve reduced the time from signup to get real, useful insights from Kentik.

This new interface is much more than a new look with an overhauled UI, but also a transformation in how Kentik provides proactive advice and advanced troubleshooting capabilities. This change represents the beginning of Kentik’s transformation from a network monitoring product to an AIOps platform, turning your data into actionable insights.

Kentik V4 Highlights

Kentik V4 is built around a brand new AIOps Engine, that was designed to surface relevant, actionable and interesting events around your network traffic, health, security, and applications. This system empowers operators to efficiently identify, troubleshoot and resolve real issues on their networks- fast.

With V4, we took note of our customers’ feedback to design and build workflows that make time-consuming and repetitive tasks easy. We are kicking this effort off with the launch of two new modules:

• The Connectivity Costs module helps network operators keep track of their current and historical bandwidth costs- helping network operators gain visibility into their costliest applications, sites, and customers.
• We’ve also released our new Traffic Engineering module, which makes easy work of finding complex traffic groups when performing traffic engineering tasks.

We’ve also developed an innovative way for users to interact with their network data. V4’s new Quick Views module was designed from the ground up to present users with their infrastructure data elegantly and intuitively. While the beloved Data Explorer lives on for those that wish to limitlessly spelunk into flows, our new Quick Views module promises to deliver the same precision and flexibility you’ve come to expect from us, but without requiring expert-level knowledge of the Data Explorer.

Kentik V4 UI Design Overview

Your new Kentik landing page is shown in the screenshot below. There are 3 panels (left, middle, right) that serve different purposes:

• The Sidebar Navigation on the left is a menu to navigate around the portal.
• The Main Panel is a content display, with content related to the which menu item you click on.
• The Insights Sidebar on the right is one of the highlights of Kentik V4. It automatically notifies users of interesting or anomalous network conditions or traffic behaviors based on the patterns surfaced by our new Insights Engine.

Here are a few quick peeks to the New Kentik UI. Note that all aspects of the UI shown here are subject to change as the product evolves.

V4 Menu Walkthrough:

V4 Connectivity Costs Module:

V4 Network Map Module:

Conclusion and What’s Next

Kentik V4 is designed to guide users to discover hidden conditions in the network that would be very difficult for operators to find within with a huge volume of diverse network data streams—across both traditional and cloud infrastructure . With the Kentik V4 AIOps platform, customers can accelerate the network team’s efficiency, automate issue resolution, and create new business capabilities using these instant insights.

Kentik’s AIOps platform is available for early access to existing customers and will be GA in later 2019 with more comprehensive support for more use cases and functions, such as Capacity Planning, Container Networking Visibility, Subscriber intelligence, MyKentik Portal and much more.

For more information, please see the Knowledge Base V4 or contact our Customer Success team to get access to the preview.

This December 2018, we revamped the export of chart and table information from Data Explorer. The labeling in the Export submenu (from the drop-down Options menu at the top right of the chart display area) is now more intuitive, offering the following export options:

• Chart + Legend: Export, as a single PDF, both the visualization and the results table.
• Chart Image: Export, as either bitmap (PNG) or vector (SVG), just the visualization.
• Data: Export, as CSV, the data for either the visualization or the results table.

If Data Explorer is currently displaying the results of a compound (multi-axis) query, then in addition to the options listed above the Export submenu will include a Series Data option (as shown below) from which you can choose to export either the visualization (as PNG) or the results table (as CSV) associated with each individual axis of the query results.

Kentik Detect lets you apply dimension-based filtering in many locations throughout the portal, including Library dashboards, Data Explorer, alert policies, the analytics pages, and even the user admin page (where you can filter the traffic that’s visible to Member users). Filtering is applied with the Filtering Options dialog, which we’ve now redesigned in several different ways - read on!

First, we’ve restructured the dialog so that there are no longer separate working areas for ad hoc filters (defined in the dialog itself) and saved filters (Kentik presets or previously saved “company” filters). Instead, as demonstrated by the initial dialog state shown in the screenshot below, there is a single Filter Groups pane where you configure filter groups containing both types of filters.

Consolidating these working areas allows us to make a more fundamental improvement, which is to change the logic used in compound filters (filters built from multiple filter groups). It used to be that all filter groups with saved filters were first ANDed together and then ANDed with the combination of all filter groups with ad hoc filters. But now you can mix and match saved and ad hoc filters in the same filter group, either at a single level or nested, and groups can be either ANDed or ORed together.

In the filter group below, for example, you can see four distinct filters: two single-condition filters at top (source country and destination URL), then a saved filter (MYNETWORK_IN), and then a nested group that excludes traffic from two source cities.

To implement these new capabilities we’ve made some changes to filtering controls, notably the addition of the Add Saved Filter button to each filter group. As shown below, we’ve also made it easy to check the individual components of a saved filter. Just click the expand icon (right-facing triangle) to the left of a filter’s name to reveal a list of its parts.

Another improvement is that you can now convert a saved filter to an ad hoc filter, allowing you to build new filters from saved filters rather than starting from scratch. To do so, click the saved filter’s Customize button, which you can see at the top right in the screenshot above.

The enhanced flexibility that we’ve built into our new filtering UI now enables you to zero in on the precise result you need. For a complete explanation of the new filtering controls, see the Filter Groups Interface article in our Knowledge Base, or ask the Kentik Customer Success team at support@kentik.com.

As we work to make Kentik Detect more powerful we’re also aware that features are most valuable to users when they’re easy and straightforward to use, as well as to customize for individual needs. The improvements in the next couple of sections are designed with that in mind.

Redesigned Dimension Selector

Working with dimensions for both group-by and filtering is an integral part of defining the queries used throughout Kentik Detect. We’ve taken a fresh look at how customers access and select dimensions, and made the following improvements in the dimension selectors for both group-by and filtering:

• Dimension categories – Dimensions are now organized into more intuitive categories, such as Network & Traffic Topology, IP & BGP Routing, and Cloud.

• Directional columns – Additionally, dimensions are now organized into Source, Destination, and Non-Directional columns to make them easier to locate. This also means that the Source and Destination versions of related dimensions are always located next to each other in the same row.

• New dimensions for clouds – The newly-added categories include provider-specific categories for AWS and GCP dimensions.

• Bi-directional filtering – In the dimension selector for Ad-Hoc Filter Groups, we’ve also added a Source or Destination column to simplify filtering on the same value in two related dimensions.

Custom Color Palettes

Kentik customers have always recognized UI design as one of our major differentiators. The ability to customize aspects of that design, tailoring it to individual needs and preferences, makes it even more powerful. Our latest step in this direction is the new Visualizations tab, which you’ll find on the My Profile page (access from the drop-down menu at far right in the main portal navbar).

As shown below, you can tune five different color settings that determine how visualizations are rendered:

• Theme – Toggle between the Standard Theme with a light background or the Dark Theme.
• Labels – Customize the color of labels by choosing from a popup color palette or entering a hex number.
• Overlays – Change the color of the Total and Historical overlays that are used on time-series visualizations.
• Quantitative – Choose a color theme for all chart types that display quantitative data such as Stacked Area Chart, 100% Stacked Area Chart, Stacked Column Chart, and Bar Chart.
• Qualitative – Choose a color theme for all chart types that show qualitative data such as Line Chart, Pie Chart, and Sunburst.

When changing the Quantitative and Qualitative color palettes, you can preview the effect on different view types by choosing a view type from the drop-down menu at upper right of the preview visualization. Once you save the changes, the new palette will be applied to all of your existing (and future) visualizations of that type (Quantitative or Qualitative) throughout the portal.

Finally, for Qualitative and Qualitative settings, you can create custom color palettes by turning on the Use custom values switch.

For more information, please contact the Kentik Customer Success team at support@kentik.com.

Beyond new features, we’ve continued our ongoing work on refining the utility and performance of Kentik Detect. The following enhancements cover areas that you can see as well as areas that are under the hood.

Enhanced Mitigation States and Controls

Anomaly detection, alerting, and mitigation, which are among the core features of Kentik Detect, sometimes involve complex situations like multiple mitigation actions and overlapping alarms. To better handle these scenarios we’ve simplified our state machine model. Updates include:

• Take manual control – Users can now assert manual control over mitigations that were originally triggered automatically. To support this change, we’ve created a separate set of manual mitigation states that parallel the states used in automated mitigation.
• Easier mitigation deletion – When deleting a mitigation, users now don’t have to additionally clear the mitigation on the mitigation appliance or wait for state transition to occur.
• Mitigation escalation – When an alarm escalates (starts as Minor and becomes Major), mitigations will now escalate in parallel. That means users can now associate a particular mitigation method with the minor threshold and a different method with the major threshold.

In addition to these backend changes, the UI for mitigation actions in the Active Alarms table (Alerting » Active) has been changed to provide more flexible and granular control. Play and Stop icons have now been replaced with context dependent icons and tool tips that reflect the current mitigation state.

Selective Interface Classification

A number of customers requested that we allow Interface Classification rules to be applied to some devices and not others. As shown below, the IF settings in the Add Rule dialog now include two new controls that enable you to tailor sets of Included Devices and Excluded Devices that govern application of the rule.

These whitelists and blacklists will also be displayed, as shown below, in the Rules List on the main classification page (Admin » Interface Classification).

For more information, please see the Rule IF Settings topic in the Kentik Knowledge Base or contact the Kentik Customer Success team at support@kentik.com.

Query Engine Improvements

Kentik Data Engine is the backend where your network traffic data is collected and enriched, and from which it is pulled at query run-time. Recent enhancements enable Kentik Detect to support ad-hoc queries over longer time ranges with much higher cardinality. For example, we can see source/destination IP pairs as a time series over a time range of 90 or more days. As requested by some customers, Data Explorer’s Table view can also now display much deeper results — up to 50,000 rows — for queries on certain group-by dimensions when the metric type is Total. Additional changes include improved performance for queries that filter on long lists of IP addresses.

In concert with our cloud efforts, we’ve also taken an overall look at how best to support two important useability goals: improving ease of onboarding and making it easier for you to discover valuable features that you might not be aware of.

Redesigned Onboarding Workflow

To simplify Kentik Detect setup in the portal we’ve added a landing page to the Admin section, with setup tasks grouped into panes that each correspond to a stage of the setup workflow:

1. Add data sources – Access to dialogs and Admin pages for routers and switches, servers and hosts, AWS, and GCP.
2. Tell us about your network – Interface and network classification, sites, and device labels.
3. Enrich your data:
   - Custom dimensions: Add business context to your network data.
   - Flow tags: Categorize your network data.
   - Custom geo: Align geolocation with your business territories or regions.
   - Custom DNS: Specify alternate servers for DNS resolution.
4. Customize your Kentik experience:
   - Set up tenants for the My Kentik Portal.
   - Configure subscriptions for reporting.
   - Define saved filters.
5. Access and security:
   - Register and manage users.
   - Set up single sign-on and access control.
6. Plans – Check your utilization of Kentik Detect compared to the limits defined in your plans.

Collapsible Admin Sidebar

In addition to adding a landing page in Admin we’ve also made the sidebar collapsible, so it’s out of the way when you’re not navigating from page to page. To access the Admin menu, just move your mouse toward the left edge of any Admin page, which will expand the sidebar and show the familiar list of Admin pages.

Improved Feature Discoverability

Admin isn’t the only area that’s been rethought. The landing page of the portal Library has also been revamped to make it easier to discover features that will maximize the benefits you can gain from Kentik Detect. We’ll continue to make valuable features more apparent. At the moment we’re using the landing page to highlight the following options:

• Configure data sources now prompts you to add new devices and clouds to your existing fleet, which is typically the first action a new Kentik user will want to perform.
• Featured Content exposes noteworthy Kentik presets for Dashboards and Saved Views. This section will evolve to promote content that’s tailored to individual users based on role, type of network, and use cases.
• Resources list useful links that can help new Kentik users get up to speed and bootstrap their knowledge of Kentik Detect and the portal. Expect to see more personalization here over time as well.
• Product Updates include links to the latest entries in this Product Update blog, so you no longer have to check for them on the Kentik website.

Bracketing allows you define from two to five ranges (brackets) of values and assign various colors to the brackets (see Bracketing Options dialog below) so that you can see at a glance the range into which the current value falls.

If bracketing is turned on for a given query the colors will be applied to the query’s returned table. Depending on the visualization type (see Chart View Types) these colors may also be applied to the visualization itself.

We’ve recently added Time Series Line Graph to the list of view types that support bracketing for visualizations (see Bracketing View Types). In this case, as shown below, the boundaries between brackets are represented by the colored horizontal lines that run across the chart at 100, 150, 200, and 400M.

For additional information, please see the Bracketing Pane Settings topic in the Kentik KB or contact the Kentik Customer Success team at support@kentik.com.