Latest features, improvements, and product updates on Kentik's Network Observability platform.
Landlords can now set a different My Kentik Portal landing page to replace its default landing screen. Each tenant can have a different landing page, and it is configured in the “Views” section of a tenant’s configuration screen:
My Kentik Portal (MKP) is a multi-tenant white-label network observability service that enables Kentik’s customers to market network analytics on top of their existing services. MKP is flexible and easy to use. MKP analytics data can be customized to serve customers’ unique requirements.
What’s New with MKP?
My Kentik Portal has been ported to v4. In addition to everything available in v3, the new v4-based MKP comes with a new and streamlined landlord and tenant UI. Also, v3 was only available to Kentik Premier customers. With v4, we are now making MKP available to all customers (Classic, Pro, Premier).
Read Greg Villain's full announcement in this blog post.
A few noteworthy improvements brought with the v4 version include:
While in practice the templates work the same, landlords now have the ability to brand them. The “Packages” tab will show the adoption of these packages across tenants.
Landlords can now see all the views assigned to a tenant at configuration time, whether assigned ad-hoc or as part of a template.
Tenant configuration now includes the ability to view the resulting filter as well as a direct option on all dashboards to “Preview as a Tenant.” This will append a clearly identifiable (named) filter group to the current dashboard filtering options and mimic what the target tenant will see.
The redesigned tenant portal takes advantage of the screen’s real estate to display all of the analytics and alerting information at a glance. The improvements also allow for Guided Dashboard parameters to be entered directly from the landing page.
My Kentik Portal tenants are now able to partition flows across their tenants, leveraging custom dimensions. For example, this can be useful for tenants, provisioned on a layer two network, where their port’s MAC address uniquely identifies them.
Any number of Custom Dimensions are supported. Each Custom Dimension selection is OR’ed. This is supported via a User Filter. You can automatically replace filters in dashboards that match tenants’ custom dimension definitions to provide inbound and outbound dashboarding capabilities.
The My Kentik Portal is a built-in feature of the Kentik platform that enables curated, self-service network traffic visibility for downstream customers (learn more in the My Kentik Solution Brief).
To enhance the experience of creating tenants in a scalable way, Kentik now allows you to group views and alert policies into a template which can be assigned to tenants. For example, you could build a set of tenant settings that are then applied to multiple, similar tenants while still being able to add individual settings that are specific to each tenant.
From the Admin > Customize menu, choose My Kentik Portal. Here you will find the Templates UI on the right. It lists all existing Templates with an Add Template option to create a new one.
Once you’ve added a template, you can then apply it as new Tenants are created:
For more information, see the Tenant Templates topic in the Knowledge Base, or contact our Customer Success Team.
With Single Sign-On (SSO), a user can log in with a single ID and password to gain access to any of several related systems. It’s a convenient, centralized way to manage security and access control to applications. For the last couple of years we’ve supported SSO access to customer accounts on the main Kentik portal. Now we also allow Kentik customers to enable SSO for their My Kentik Portal tenants.
Customers who use this new feature will provision tenants on their existing SSO platform, so tenants will be authenticated at login using SSO instead of local user credentials. To configure tenant SSO, you’ll have to have an existing identity provider account or in-house identity management system (see SSO Config Prerequisites), and also be a Super Admin for your organization (see About Super Admin Users).
Tenant SSO is activated in the Kentik Detect portal on the Admin » My Kentik Portal page. At the bottom of the My Kentik Portal Settings pane (below the Save button) you’ll see the “info” notice shown below. Click the My Kentik Portal Single Sign-on Settings link.
In the resulting My Kentik Portal Single Sign-on page (shown below) fill in the fields as described in the KB topic Tenant SSO Settings.
For assistance with getting SSO correctly configured for your tenants (or your own organization), please contact our Customer Success team.
My Kentik™ Portal is a built-in feature of the Kentik platform that enables curated, self-service network traffic visibility for downstream customers (solution brief here). Because we’re strongly committed to supporting features not only through our portal but also via APIs, we’ve now introduced the My Kentik API.
Providing an initial set of four methods, the My Kentik API enables Kentik customers to programmatically manage settings for their My Kentik Portal tenants. Development work is ongoing to achieve full parity with the functionality that’s available in the Kentik portal via the My Kentik Portal page.
The following methods are available now, and can be tested with the V5 API Tester for our US and EU clusters:
For more information, please see the My Kentik API topic in the Kentik Knowledge Base or contact our Customer Success team.
Tenant “spoofing” enables you to see your My Kentik portal as if you were a specific user assigned to a specific tenant, so that you can evaluate for yourself how that tenant’s current portal configuration is meeting users’ needs.
Instead of having to create an account for yourself in the userspace of a tenant, you can now simply click the Open in Tenant View button on the My Kentik Portal page. In the resulting dialog (shown below left), select a tenant and an individual user to spoof. When you’re done, click on the user menu at the right of the navbar and choose Stop Spoofing from the drop-down menu (below right).
For additional information, please see the My Kentik Portal topic in the Kentik KB or contact the Kentik Customer Success team at support@kentik.com.
Back in Q2 of this year, we announced the My Kentik Portal, which enables curated, self-service network traffic visibility for downstream customers (see the My Kentik solution brief). Building on this initial launch, we’ve subsequently been improving the feature-set to add value for our customers and their customers (internal or external), whom we refer to as “tenants.” A number of these major updates were completed in September, including the ability to expose tenants to alerts, a redesign of the tenant configuration UI, and a “spoofing” capability that allows customers to see the My Kentik portal through the eyes of an individual tenant. Here’s a closer look at these improvements.
One of the key features of Kentik Detect is its ability to generate alerts based on highly customized network traffic conditions that are defined in Alert Policies. If you’ve configured policies you can now enable the tenants in your My Kentik portal to receive alerts from some or all of those policies. And you can even tailor the thresholds that will cause those policies to trigger alerts for a given tenant.
There are two ways to enable your tenants to view alerts in the My Kentik portal. One is by adding one or more of your policies to the Tenant Default Alert Policies list so they can be seen by all of your tenants (see Tenant Default Content below). The other is to add one or more policies to an individual tenant (shown at right), so that the policies can be seen by any user assigned to that tenant. You do that in the Add Tenant dialog (opened by the button of the same name) or Edit Tenant dialog (opened by clicking on a tenant in your Tenant List). These tenant settings include an Alert Policies Settings pane where you can choose the policies to make available to the users assigned to that tenant.
Once you add one or more policies, the Alert Policy Settings pane will resemble the image below. If individual thresholds are shown for the policy you can make tenant-specific adjustments to the criteria that will trigger an alert to be displayed in the My Kentik portal.
Once you’ve added alert policies to a given tenant’s configuration, the My Kentik portal for that tenant will include icons for Alarms and Alert History (shown at right). When tenant users click on Alarms they’ll see a list of of Active Alerts. When users click on Alert History they’ll see a list of alarms, mitigations, and matches for a specified time range (see Alert History).
As mentioned above, you now have the ability to assign default content that will be visible to the users of all of your tenants. You specify default content on your main My Kentik Portal admin page under Tenant Defaults, where you’ll find the Views and Alert Policies settings (shown below). Each is a drop-down menu listing the existing views or alert policies in your organization. You can choose any item from the list, and add as many defaults in each category as you’d like to make accessible to all of your tenants.
Subtenancy provides a mechanism by which a Kentik customer (e.g. an ISP) can enable each of its own external or internal customers to see a curated set of visualizations and metrics of their own traffic. This has been a recurring ask from existing and prospective Kentik users, and we’re excited to announce the availability of this feature.
Subtenancy needs to be activated by Kentik (contact Customer Success for details), after which you’ll see a new page (Admin » Subtenancy) that we’ve created for you to manage subtenancy in the Kentik Detect portal.
As shown above, you begin configuration by defining the properties of your subtenant portal (subdomain, logo, etc.; see Subtenancy Page in our Knowledge Base), which can be thought of as a customer-branded version of the portal Library (see below).
Next, you’ll use the Add Subtenant dialog (shown below) to create subtenants that can access the subtenant portal. If you’re an ISP, each subtenant might correspond to one of your business accounts. Alternatively, a large Enterprise might create subtenants that each corresponds to an internal team that would benefit from access to specific reports generated by Kentik. For each subtenant, you can determine the reports (e.g. Dashboards and Saved Views) that will be available, the traffic that’s covered in those reports, and the subtenant users (identified by email address) that will have access.
The subtenant portal feature will help Kentik customers boost revenue by selling subtenancy as a value-added service. And subtenancy will also increase the “stickiness” of ISP service offerings, which can provide a significant edge in a competitive provider market.