Feature Overview

Together at last! We've made major improvements to how devices are viewed and managed on the Kentik platform by unifying multiple device management, performance detail, and traffic analysis pages into a unified devices experience. We've combined our three different "Device Listing/Admin" pages and two different "Device Details" pages, bringing forward the best of each.

Happy Valentines Day, from Kentik!

Unified Device Administration

These three previously separate sections of the platform have been combined into one:

• Settings > Network Devices: where previously we managed "flow source" devices
• NMS > Devices: were previously we managed "NMS" device performance
• Network Explorer > Devices: where we showed aggregate traffic from multiple devices

Unified Device Details

We also combined and refined these two previously separate Device Details pages into one:

• NMS > Devices > (device_name): which provided performance information
• Network Explorer > Devices > (device_name): which provided for traffic analysis

Main Benefits

This is the initial step in a broad reaching project to make our NMS and Flow experiences more cohesive with a focus on the reality that there aren't "Flow devices" and "NMS devices", there are simply "devices we collect data from."

The most obvious key benefits are:

• One single, centralized, collection-protocol-agnostic place to administer all devices, providing a more seamless experience when investigating network traffic and/or device performance
• One single search capability: instead of NMS Devices and Networking Devices, universal search capability now returns only one single result, better aligning with reality
• For each device, we also now display all data in a single tabular place

Key Workflows

The changes in this new set of features center around three workflows: navigation, administration, details.

Navigation Changes

As part of this unification, we’ve re-wired multiple navigation links:

• Top Talkers > Devices → now leads to /infrastructure/devices where it used to lead to /core/quick-views/devices/
• Settings > Devices → now also leads to /infrastructure/devices
• NMS > Devices  → now leads to /infrastructure/devices
• Any Metrics Explorer or Data Explorer device link now leads to /infrastructure/devices/

These endpoints are not changing for now:

• /settings/interfaces still exists, while /infrastructure/devices//interfaces now offers an improved (more filtering, more powerful), list of interfaces narrowed down to the
• /nms/interfaces for now remains as a single, global interfaces screen for all NMS devices, while /infrastructure/devices//interfaces now offers an improved (more filtering, more powerful), list of interfaces narrowed down to the

Unified Device Administration

This screen becomes the singular place where users browse their inventory and add/remove devices from their Kentik experience. It presents the following characteristics:

• Two main tabs: “Traffic” and “Manage”

  • Traffic corresponds to our well known Network Explorer /core/quick-views/devices traffic related, top-talker screen
  • Manage corresponds to the merged and improved /nms/devices  and /settings/devices screens
• Three distinct “View Modes”, each corresponding to a column arrangement within the main Manage tab:
  • Monitor is a default column-set focused around performance monitoring
  • Admin is a default column-set focused around Kentik administration
  • Custom lets the user select and organize the specific columns they want 
• More powerful filtering and grouping options

Unified Device Details

• Overview - performance and vitality summary of the device
• Interfaces - filterable, searchable, data-rich list of all interfaces on the device 
• Connections - filterable, searchable, data-rich list of LLDP/manual topology connections
• Traffic - enriched traffic flow and "top talker" information for the device
• Hardware - vitality information from device components, such as fans and power supplies 
• BGP Neighbors - peer AS names, session states, local and remote IPs, and summary info
• Telemetry - New! This tab highlights data collection methods and if they're working or not

Feature Requests & Bugs

This is a new feature and we're actively seeking your feedback and ideas to make it better. Reach out through your customer success rep or directly to the Kentik NMS Product Manager (Jason Carrier, jcarrier@kentik.com) if you'd like to influence the future development of this feature.

Feature Overview

We're excited to announce our new device-based alert-policy-creation workflow which provides a simpler, more powerful approach to creating intent-based alerts and notifications. Our now-deprecated "Up/Down" policies only allowed alerting on present states, "up" or "down" for example. The new system understands state changes and allows for multi-measurement comparison.

Specifically, Kentik users can now:

• Alert on entity state changes
  ex: BGP transitions from “established” to “active or “idle”
• Alert on multi-measurement threshold breaches
  ex: laser temp and fan-speed high, where int desc is “X”
• Enjoy Alert Manager Support for notifications, suppressions, silencing, acknowledgements, clearing and alert detail views

Key Workflows

Where to Start

From the Alert Policies Management page, users will notice the first change when adding new alert policies. These new "NMS" type alerts entirely replace our now-legacy "Up/Down" policy type. "Up/Down" policies that existed prior to release of this new feature still exist, and are editable. However, it is no longer possible to create alert policies of this type. Our new "NMS" alerting capabilities are better in every way.

Adding a new policy: General

The General section of the "Add NMS Alert Policy" workflow allows you to put a name and description on the policy, as well as control whether or not it's enabled.

Adding a new policy: Target & Filter Settings

The "Target & Filter Settings" section of the "Add NMS Alert Policy" workflow allows users to set their intent. This field defines what "entity" or custom measurement the user wishes to drive a notification against and grab their attention. Currently supported "entity" types are BGP Neighborships, Components, Devices, and Interfaces. The selected "Target Type" will control what "Measurements" are available to alert against.

The "Edit Devices" button will open a dialog box to determine which devices the alert policy should apply to.

Adding a new policy: Activate & Clear Settings

This new NMS alerting system will only support a single severity level per policy for now. We intend to expand this in the future. From this screen, users can also toggle acknowledgement and manual clearance requirements, set notification channels, and tune activation and clearance delay.

The part of the new system we're most excited to share is our Alert Conditions workflow! This allows users to build sentence-style conditions with advanced logic to build out complex and specific alert criteria. At least one trigger condition is required. The measurement determines what metric is available. Condition dropdowns allow for construction of readable sentences. Threshold and state conditions can be stacked. It's a massively flexible system, and this is just our first release. In the near future we intend to add support for "nested Boolean", or "compound expression" conditions.

Managing Alerts

There are essentially no changes in terms of how and where to manage this new type of alert. NMS device-centric alerts work just like traditional Kentik alerts in that they are viewed from the Alerting page, have Alert Detail sub-views, and can be suppressed, silenced, acknowledged, commented on, or cleared.

Feature Requests & Bugs

This is a new feature and we're actively seeking your feedback and ideas to make it better. Reach out through your customer success rep or directly to the Kentik NMS Product Manager (Jason Carrier, jcarrier@kentik.com) if you'd like to influence the future development of this feature.

Google Cloud allows customers to configure sampling rates at the flow records generation point on a per-subnet basis, which can significantly reduce the cost of flow log generation.

The Kentik portal now displays the average sampling rate for each exporter and the number of subnets configured with sampling. This is not a configuration knob, but a value configured on the Google Cloud dashboard. The inclusion of this data in Kentik Cloud provides a quick way for users working multi-cloud environments to consume sampling rate information.

In the coming months, we're going to consistently streamline the Settings screen as you have known it.

Today, we're sharing the 1st iteration of this broader project – Organization Settings. Kentik users now have a new Organization Settings menu displayed next to User Settings at the top right of the navigation bar, making it easier and faster to manage company and organization-wide settings.

Let's start with what's new in the Organization Settings menu:

• Licenses moved from the top Navigation menu to this menu
• All of the additional links in this menu have been moved over from the Settings screen 
• You'll also notice that your Kentik Company ID (CID) is now mentioned at the top right of this menu

The User menu is right next to it and now looks like this – the entries are self-explanatory. User Name, Email, and your Kentik Portal User ID (UID) are now displayed in this menu.

Thanks to relocating many of these entries from the Settings page, the Settings page now displays a more streamlined and clean look. Additionally, we've created a dedicated section for all Alerting settings to be housed – making the page much more homogenous and easy to navigate for users. 

Let us know how you feel about these changes! 

We are pleased to announce the release of the latest version (1.7.0) of the Kentik Grafana plugin.

In this release, our primary focus was on enhancing compatibility with the latest Grafana 10 and upcoming versions. To achieve this, we have transitioned from the legacy "Angular" plugin framework to the modern "React" framework.

Please note that the Kentik Grafana plugin requires a minimum Grafana version of 8.3.0 or higher. To facilitate the upgrade process, please follow these steps:

• Restart Grafana: To ensure the seamless integration of the updated plugin, kindly restart your Grafana instance.
• Restart the Plugin: Navigate to the Plugins section in your Grafana interface, locate the Kentik Connect Pro plugin, and disable it by clicking the Disable button. Afterward, enable the plugin by clicking the Enable button.

With regards to functionality, the new version of the Kentik Grafana plugin retains all the features present in the previous releases, related to the creation of dashboard panels and seamless visualization of flow data. However, please note that the Devices management feature which included the creation of new devices and editing existing ones, has been removed.

Looking ahead, we are committed to enhancing the Kentik Grafana plugin further by introducing new capabilities and incorporating valuable feedback from our users. We encourage you to share your ideas for improvement in the comments section or submit your feature requests through our dedicated Customer Success team.

We are excited to bring you more feature-rich updates in the future.

Following through with the recent release of our PeeringDB integration, we've sat with our users and collected their feedback, which lead to a few granular improvements – read on!

Access PeeringDB records from any ASN anywhere in Kentik Portal

In a lot of places in the Kentik portal, we're displaying ASNs: Data Explorer queries, Network Explorer, Kentik Market Intelligence, etc...There's a common set of actions users always want to perform when it comes to an ASN: look at their footprint via PeeringDB, look at their ranking in a specific market via KMI, and so on.

We've altered the way we displayed these ASNs in the product so that you can always get to PeeringDB or KMI in a click, see for yourself:

Making PeeringDB easier to map with Kentik Sites

As we watched users configuring their PeeringDB mappings to Kentik Sites, we noticed that oftentimes, they didn't know the exact PeeringDB facility name to look for, and more than anything referred to them by their address. The lookup field in the Site mapping functionality in "Settings > Manage Sites" now displays the address and will also autocomplete based on users' address input, see below:

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.