Laying the foundation for class-specific Device Details

Kentik NMS is getting smarter about how we meet the observability needs of the kinds of devices you're monitoring.

Until now, all Device Details pages looked the same—whether you were viewing a router, switch, firewall, or even a server or UPS. This one-size-fits-all approach helped us get the feature out the door, but we know it’s not how network operators think or work.

Why this matters

When troubleshooting or planning, operators expect different insights from different devices:

• Routers: You care about routing tables, interface health, BGP sessions.
• Switches: You want to see port status, VLAN memberships, trunk links.
• Firewalls: You’re hunting for ACLs, session counts, and threat logs.

That’s why we’re introducing device “classes”—clear, functional groupings like Router, Switch, Firewall, Server, and more. These classifications will allow Kentik NMS to tailor what data we highlight on each Device Details page, surfacing the most relevant insights first.

What’s new today

This release introduces:

✅ New class icons for fast visual identification
✅ Device classifications across all NMS and Flow-enriched devices
✅ Vendor logos added to the Vendor column in the Devices table

These changes enhance both the navigation experience and the visual consistency across the product.

Class icons uniquely represent the 12 devices classes we found more prevalently on our platform: Router, Switch, Firewall, Load Balancer, SD-WAN Gateway, Wireless Controller, Access Point, Server, UPS, PDU, Optical Transport, and Storage Array. In the future, we'll be adding the ability for admins to change the assigned device class, and create their own custom classes!

Classifications have been added most conspicuously to the Devices and Device Details pages, making identifying a device's base functionality much easier. Classification happens automatically based on the SysObjectID-derived make and model, and some AI magic. Previously, a device's icon was driven by a mixture of the Flow device type or device vendor. As not to lose the value, the vendor icon has been added to the vendor column.

🔜 Coming soon: Rich, class-specific views that show the right metrics, tables, and visualizations based on what kind of device you're looking at.

Why it’s better

• Less clutter: Device icons are now consistently based on a single characteristic - function class.
• ‍Instant recognition: Icons + vendor logos = less scanning, faster decisions.
• More context: Classes unlock tailored data views for each device type.

This is just the first step in a bigger journey to make Kentik NMS a truly intelligent network observability platform. Let us know what you think—and what you want to see next!

We are excited to release a new Kentik AI feature called “Cause Analysis," part of our core Traffic Analysis portfolio. Designed to help network engineers more quickly understand the underlying network traffic contributing to network anomalies, this new interactive feature in Data Explorer uses data mining, AI, and Kentik's industry-leading context enrichment to instantly identify the most relevant and contributing factors (dimensions) of network traffic within a given time frame. It reduces the amount of time it takes to investigate sudden traffic changes, like spikes, increases and drops in relatively short time frames.

Our goal is to make it easier and faster for our users to quickly understand the most important characteristics of the traffic contributing to a change, like application, IP addresses or prefixes, ASNs or public cloud services. This analysis is done automatically upon user request without needing to select any flow dimensions in the Kentik Data Explorer and without expert level knowledge in traffic analysis. The results can easily guide a user to understand the cause of traffic changes and anomalies and to take appropriate further actions.

This feature is available for companies that have enabled Kentik AI.

Cause Analysis in Data Explorer

Cause Analysis in Data Explorer supports three user workflows:

Traffic analysis - to find the most contributing traffic dimensions in a single time selection window

In this workflow, a user is able to select a single time window on the graph and to invoke Cause Analysis. Currently the time window is limited to 2 hours.

The results of the analysis will be shown below the chart in an additional tab named “Cause Analysis” which will emphasize the most contributing factors on the traffic during the selected time window. A Kentik AI summary of the results is provided at the top of the panel. The lower part of the panel shows numerical results presented in a hierarchical table, which are produced by Kentik’s data mining algorithms.

The values of traffic rate and the percentages in this table are estimates and not the completely exact values. The intention of this feature is to efficiently emphasize the most contributing dimensions to help answer the question "what happened?".

The analysis considers selected traffic metric, e.g. Bits/sec, Packets/sec or Flows/sec.

Traffic comparison analysis - to find changes in traffic patterns between two selected time windows

In this workflow, a user is able to select two time windows on the graph and to invoke Cause Analysis, which will then show the most contributing factors to the traffic increase. This helps users quickly answer the question "what changed?" The system will first compare the two selected windows based on average traffic volume. Based on the results, it will further compare the window with lower average traffic to the window with higher average traffic, emphasizing which type of traffic significantly contributed to the increase. With this approach, it is irrelevant which time window will be selected first.

The results of the analysis will be shown below the chart in the tab called “Cause Analysis”. Kentik AI’s summary of the results is provided at the top of the panel. The lower part of the panel shows numerical results presented in a hierarchical table, which are produced by Kentik’s data mining algorithms.

Automatic detection and analysis of traffic changes

In this workflow, the system will automatically analyze time series results in Data Explorer and look for significant changes in the traffic that might be interesting to the customer. Those significant changes can be spikes, drops or sudden increases and decreases in traffic. On these changes, Kentik AI will perform analysis of the traffic difference before and after the change, trying to pinpoint which traffic contributed to the increase or decrease.

The workflow starts when a user clicks the button “Analyze” at the top of the time series chart or at the bottom of the query panel.

• The system will try to detect the most significant 5 changes (configurable)
• These changes will be marked in the chart
• The “Cause Analysis” panel below the chart will list the changes with the relevant details: type of the change, average traffic metric of the change and time of the change point.
• An AI summary of the change will be provided in the summary section
• Each change can be further visually expanded to show numerical results presented in the hierarchical table, which are results of Kentik’s data mining algorithms.

Cause Analysis in Kentik Insights

With this first release, Cause Analysis is also being integrated into the Device Traffic Increase Insight. The Insight is enriched with valuable information of the most contributing factors to the device traffic increase.

The system will automatically determine when the traffic increase started and perform analysis of traffic differences between traffic before increase and during detected increase. The results are presented below the time-series chart with a Kentik AI summary of the results and the relevant details. This information can help users determine what is a likely cause of such traffic increase on the particular device.

As always, we welcome your feedback as you start to use this new feature. Please reach out with any questions, concerns or feedback.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Kentik Journeys, a flagship user experience of our Kentik AI family of features. You can enable this innovative tool directly through the Kentik AI configuration switch in your portal.

What is Kentik Journeys

Kentik Journeys offers a dedicated space for iterative network exploration and troubleshooting, leveraging a conversational interface powered by Kentik AI. Traditionally, network engineers have relied on network monitoring systems to browse and analyze data charts, refine queries, and repeat this process until they identify and resolve network issues. With Kentik Journeys, this process becomes more streamlined and efficient, thanks to the power of AI.

Checkout our Blog for What's New with Kentik AI to get more information about the nice features we added recently.

How to Enable Kentik AI

Kentik Journeys is part of Kentik AI feature set which can be enabled at the Organization level by users with Super Admin role in the Kentik Portal.

• For organizations which have already accessed Journeys in Preview, the Kentik AI switch is turned on by default — no changes required from your side.
• For organizations which have not enabled Journeys in Preview, the Kentik AI switch is turned off. 

Enabling Kentik AI

• Go to Journeys page on (US|EU) portal
• If Kentik AI is enabled in your organization you will be able to use it immediately
• If Kentik AI is not enabled yet:
  • If you are Member or Admin user, you will see the information to contact your Super Admin user for enabling Kentik AI
  • If you are Super Admin user, you will find the link to the Kentik AI settings page, where you can enable it. 
  • In rare case when your organization does not have Super Admin users, you will find the "Request Access" button to submit support request for enabling Kentik AI, after which our Product Support team will reach out to you with further details. 

Kentik AI settings page

• Kentik AI settings page is visible only to organization's Super Admin users (US|EU)
• The page is available through Organization settings icon on the top right side of the portal
• Simply toggle the Kentik AI switch to turn its features on and off
• See which Kentik AI features are available for your organization
• Read relevant Data Privacy and Security information related to the use of Kentik AI

We are excited to see how Kentik Journeys will transform your network exploration and troubleshooting. For any questions or assistance, please reach out to our support team.

We are excited to announce a new feature in Kentik Journeys AI (Preview) - the new feature enables users to ask "How-to" questions relevant to a Kentik documentation and usage. The primary sources of information for the answer are our Knowledge Base and Kentik Blog posts. 

Some example questions that Journeys AI can answer:

• how to install kproxy on ubuntu
• how to install kbgp in docker
• what is peeringdb and how it is used in Kentik
• how to configure AWS cloud flow logs export in Kentik portal
• what are Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN dimensions and list them in the table
• what are available endpoints in Kentik API v5
• can you provide details on how to get all sites over API?

You can also ask questions and get answers in your language, for example: 

• me mostre como instalar o kentik kproxy no ubuntu. por favor explique isso em português

Please share your experience with us and use thumbs up/down to rate the answers you received.