Today, we are adding a set of new endpoints related to various workflows in the Kentik Portal. 

Read on!

The first thing to know before we get into the details is that you can always access our API sandbox from the navigation menu here:

We have recently added a set of previously unreleased endpoints to our v6 API, all can be visible at the following URLs in the portal:

• https://portal.kentik.com/v4/core/api-tester/ on the US SaaS Cluster
• https://portal.kentik.eu/v4/core/api-tester/ on the EU SaaS Cluster

These new endpoints cover three main areas of functionality:

• Custom AS Groups CRUD functionality
  This new endpoint set only covers the management of these AS Groups. Ongoing work is scheduled for the Data Explorer Query API to be compatible with AS Group rollups, but the release date isn't yet set.

  

• Workflow APIs

  • for Capacity Planning
    The set of endpoints we’ve added to Capacity Planning is for now exclusively centered around viewing either a summary of all capacity plans or details of specific plans. 
    

    

    

  • for Kentik Market Intelligence
    This set of API endpoints allows users to either get any ranking with any Customer-base type in any market or get customers and providers of any given network in any given local market.

    
    

    

Important note
The sandbox shown in the article is the one of the v6 of our API. We still have a v5 API which still covers a large amount of legacy unmigrated endpoints - the testing UI for them is located here:
https://api.kentik.com/api/tester/v5

Several Kentik’s APIv6 endpoints reached the Stable Release status:

• BGP Monitoring API - Provides management and access to the data of the Kentik’s BGP Monitoring functionality.

  • Admin service: provides management of the BGP Monitor objects of the Kentik’s Synthetics product
  • Data service: provides access to the BGP related data collected from various Vantage Points used by Kentik. A user is able to retrieve data about the global IP BGP prefixes, like reachability, AS paths changed and routes for the particular timeframes.

• Cloud Export Configuration API - Provides management of the Kentik’s Cloud Export objects. These objects provide a relevant configuration for Kentik to be able to retrieve and export Flow logs and metadata from user’s Public Cloud infrastructure. The API endpoint provides configuration capabilities of these object and basic status information about the active export processes. Currently supports the following public cloud providers:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Google Cloud (GCP)
  • IBM Cloud

• Label Management API - Provides CRUD operations of the Label objects, which are used to tags certain objects in Kentik, for example, devices, synthetic tests, and ksynth agents in order to create logical groups. This API endpoint is used to manage Labels, however, the application of a Label to a given object is done with the API corresponding to the type of that object.

  Object type	API for attaching labels
  Device	Device Apply Labels
  Synthetic monitoring test	SyntheticsAdminService API
  Synthetic monitoring agent	SyntheticsAdminService API
  BGP monitor	BgpMonitoringAdminService API

• Notification Channel API - Provides List and Search operations of the Kentik’s Notification objects. Each Notification channel includes a Type (e.g. email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.) and a set of Targets (recipients). The use of this API is currently subject to the following limitations:

  • Creation, modification, and deletion of channels is not supported.
  • There is no support for the notification channels created in Kentik's “v3” portal.

The important characteristics of the Kentik Platform are rich API capabilities and the supporting SDKs. For the last two years Kentik has supported the development of the community Python SDK which is based on the Kentik’s APIs. This SDK enables our customers to use Kentik’s Platform APIs natively in the Python programming language, with Python Objects and Methods instead of dealing with the details of the API syntax.

The Community Python SDK is available on GitHub: https://github.com/kentik/community_sdk_python.

Just over a month ago, we released a new version 1.0.0. Until this version, the community Python SDK supported objects and methods that are exposed within Kentik’s REST API v5. With this new release, the support has been extended to some of the endpoints of our new gRPC-based Kentik API v6, specifically supporting Synthetics monitoring and Cloud Export configuration.

Important note on breaking changes

As it is already mentioned, Kentik’s API v6 is natively a gRPC API, but it also supports the REST access. The community Python SDK is using the Kentik API v6 directly over gRPC. To accommodate communication with the Kentik backend using both REST-based Kentik API v5 and gRPC-based Kentik API v6, the necessary change has been introduced that would require a change of your existing Python scripts and programs.

In most of the cases, you would initialize the KentikAPI object with the constrictor that is using the api_url argument, for example:

from kentik_api import KentikAPI

client = KentikAPI(api_url=KentikAPI.API_URL_US, auth_email=email, auth_token=token)

The api_url argument would expect the URL to the Kentik’s API endpoint, which would be in the form: https://api.kentik.com or https://api.kentik.eu. However, the endpoint that is used for the Kentik’s API v6 is in the form of the host, for example: grpc.api.kentik.com.

For this reason and to be able to configure API access information with the single parameter, it was decided that api_url argument of the KentikAPI constructor should be replaced with api_host argument. The argument is expected to contain only the fully qualified hostname of the server hosting the target Kentik API instance (the default value is KentikAPI.API_HOST_US which is equal to api.kentik.com). Consequently, the Class variable KentikAPI.API_URL_US has been replaced with KentikAPI.API_HOST_US and KentikAPI.API_URL_EU with KentikAPI.API_HOST_EU

To summarize, if you upgrade the version of your Python SDK to 1.0.0 or later, you will need for adjust the initialization of the KentikAPI to use the changed argument, for example:

from kentik_api import KentikAPI

client = KentikAPI(api_host=KentikAPI.API_HOST_US, auth_email=email, auth_token=token)

Installation

You can easily install the latest version of the Python SDK using pip, for example:

$ python3 -m pip install kentik-api

Let us know what you think about our Python SDK and feel free to submit any contributions or issues over GitHub. Happy coding!

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:

• Tenant List (GET): Returns an array that contains information about all tenants
• Tenant Info (GET): Returns a tenant object containing information about an individual tenant
• Tenant User Create (POST): Creates a tenant user object and Returns information about that individual tenant user
• Tenant User Delete (DELETE): Deletes a tenant user from the system

For more information, please see the My Kentik API topic in the Kentik Knowledge Base or contact our Customer Success team.

Last month, we announced VRF Awareness Phase 1, including new dimensions associated with VRFs (virtual routing and forwarding). We’ve now added support for VRF attributes in the Interface methods of our Device API, which you can experiment with in our API tester (EU customers will find the tester here). The new parameters for these methods give you programmatic control of VRF attributes associated with each interface.

If SNMP polling is enabled in your Kentik instance, the VRF attributes of each interface would normally be discovered automatically as Kentik polls the VRF MIB (refer to our KB topic on Kentik-polled SNMP OIDs to see the OIDs we poll). But with VRF support in our Interface methods you can now programmatically define or redefine mappings (including RT/RD related data) between physical interfaces and the VRFs to which they belong. This could be particularly useful in the following situations:

• If your Kentik instance doesn’t use SNMP polling.
• If you have SNMP polling enabled on your device, but either:
  • Your device doesn’t support the VRF MIB.
  • The device SNMP policy doesn’t allow polling the VRF OIDs.
• If you want your VRFs to appear in Kentik Detect with names that are more human-readable than the names retrieved from SNMP.

The new parameters in the Interface methods of the Device API support both of the following cases:

• Interface creation: VRF parameters have been added to the Interface Create method.

• Interface updating: VRF parameters have also been added to the Interface Update method.

For additional information, please contact our Customer Success team.

Both Custom Dimensions and Flow Tags allow you to label flow records based on criteria defined in advance and evaluated at ingest. As announced in the HSCD topic of our May/June 2018 Product Update, our backend engineering team has been hard at work re-engineering these systems under the hood to drastically increase their capacity, scalability, and agility. As of September, all Custom Dimensions natively support this increased scale.

As part of enhancing the usability of Custom Dimensions and Flow Tags, we’ve also added a new Batch API that simplifies management by enabling bulk loading of either Populators (for Custom Dimensions) or Tags. To help you get started, we’ve posted a Hypertagging API in GitHub that you can use in Python to call our Batch API. For additional information, please refer to the Batch API topic in the Knowledge Base or contact the Kentik Customer Success team at support@kentik.com.

In our November 2017 Product Update we mentioned that we have added the ability to start a manual mitigation as opposed to triggering one off an alert. We’ve now implemented this capability as an API and added it to the extensive list of REST APIs we’ve made available to programmatically manage Kentik Detect.

Our KB article contains more information and be sure to check out our API tester, which will help guide you on using this new method.

Data Explorer improvements

Data Explorer Pivot to Dashboard

Every now and then, the simplest feature unveils a world of possibilities.  The new ability to “pivot” a row in the Data Explorer is a great example.

Clicking on the menu at the right of a row in the Data Explorer and selecting “Pivot” opens a (configurable) dashboard showing many different views of the chosen row of data based on different combinations of dimensions and metric.

This pivot feature allows rapid and comprehensive data exploration, reducing the need to manually construct a series of several ad-hoc views in the Data Explorer, for example when trying to identify “why this unexplained bump over this traffic graph occurred.”

For instance, if I am suspicious of traffic sourced in the Netherlands going to a specific IP address, here’s what I would do, taking advantage of the pivot feature:

Below, we see a dashboard that decomposes this NL → dest. IP traffic into multiple different dimensions, without making me go through the trouble of building a unique dashboard.

The pivot feature makes new paths of investigation practical that wouldn’t otherwise have been explored due to the time required to build such a dashboard, and the interruption building a dashboard causes to the investigation workflow.

The pivot feature is discussed in this Knowledge Base entry.

Data Explorer Side-bar Overhaul and Saved Views

As you’ve probably noticed, we revamped the UI of Data Explorer’s Query sidebar to further streamline its appearance.

At the same time, we’ve also added the ability to Create, Edit, and Save Views. Where you previously needed to rebuild your favorite queries in Data Explorer, you can now save them and go back to them to refine them or even share them.

The full documentation on Saved Views is available in our knowledge base under this article.

Saved Views come with an overhauled Data Explorer menu allowing quick access to them.

A new Saved Views Library section has been started, allowing users to share Saved Views within the same company, or even leverage Kentik’s library of pre-existing views.

This marks the initial steps towards a community driven initiative that will be started in the future for Kentik users to share their recipes on Dashboards, Views, Alerting policies.

Directly from the Data Explorer, look for the Save and **Load **controls at the top. With these, no more starting all over from scratch when improving on your (or your co-users’) existing visualizations. Conveniently load them and save them anytime.

Here’s a quick display of what the new Saved Views Library looks like:

Stay tuned and watch this community concept trickle down into further areas of the Kentik Detect Portal in the future.

Further IPv6 support in Data Explorer

Kentik has fully supported storage and querying of IPv6 for some time, and we are steadily adding support for IPv6 in any place where addresses or prefixes are used.

IPv6 Next-Hop flow dimension

Next-hop IP dimension in explorer and dashboards now supports IPv6 on top of the existing IPv4, as displayed in the Data Explorer Dimension selector below. Note that different CIDR thresholds can be set independently for IPv4 and IPv6.

IPv6 Source/Dest prefixes dimension

Metrics support for IPv6 added to explorer and dashboards: Unique src/dst prefix, Unique SRC/DST ASN, and Unique src/dst IP now support ipv6.

Alerting feature update

Alerting is now fully documented in our Knowledge Base; feel free to swing by and get a more detailed view of what it offers!

Additionally, Alerting now supports Route Prefix and Length (Prefix/LEN) both as a Dimension and in Filters.

API v5 updates

APIv5 documentation has been entirely updated, and is now available to our users at the following locations:

Additionally, an API functionality to return a URL to open an API call in browser (authenticated) has also been added.

Important note: The current plan is to shut down former API versions (namely v1 and v4) on May 5th.

Miscellaneous

ICMP code and type for v9/IPFIX is now supported. It is overloaded into the IP DST PORT values based on NetFlow v5 ICMP encoding.

Tags feature update

Tagging now supports regex for device names and interface fields, and supports IPv6.
As a reminder, a comprehensive table references all types of inputs for all of the available Tag Fields, it is located here.

For instance, if your interfaces always include consistent descriptions, you could potentially match said interface descriptions on either ‘PNI’ or ‘Peer’ or ‘customer’ and tag all the matches as ‘Peering’ to then be able to filter them in or out of any Data Explorer query.

Prettified JSON output to describe API calls

You can now see the API calls in Data Explorer as prettified JSON, making it much easier for your users to identify the fields at play in your API calls.

The idea here is to further simplify the task of integrating with the Kentik API under the following methodology:

1. Building a satisfactory View, tweaking it until it shows exactly what you are after
2. Exploring the resulting JSON
3. Building an integration

To describe the underlying API call of a given view, proceed as illustrated below – starts with clicking the Hamburger Menu icon on the top-right side of a view

Peering Analytics IPv6

Peering analytics now supports IPv6 as well as showing the full path on mouseover.