Custom Geos enable each Kentik customer to organize countries into custom groups so that reports and views generated in Kentik Detect are consistent with the geographical zones already in use elsewhere in their business. Rather than forcing all users to use the same predefined geographies, this feature accommodates the need for each customer to define territories however they want, which (as shown in the image below) can be quite different from company to company.

Custom Geo is part of a broader initiative to expose new dimensions that bring business logic into flow analytics, thereby making network data meaningful to teams that aren’t necessarily network savvy (e.g. interconnection managers and planners, business development individuals, and even executives). In this case, Custom Geos basically correspond to markets or sales territories, composed of multiple countries, for which data can be aggregated and presented together. This capability is especially useful for large worldwide content providers, carriers, and enterprises that need to be able to assess and compare data at the market level, as shown in the side-by-side screenshots below.

By default, Custom Geos are set to correspond to continents. To tailor the groupings for your business, go to the Admin » Custom Geo page in the portal (see screenshot below) and follow the instructions outlined in the KB topic Add or Edit Custom Geo.

Once you’ve defined your Custom Geos you can start using Custom Geo as a Source and/or Destination dimension for both group-by (e.g. in Data Explorer’s Query Dimension dialog, as pictured below) and filtering (in the Dimension Selector dialog).

Custom Geo can also be leveraged in the portal Library by building Dashboards in Guided Mode that take Custom Geo as an input. This would allow you to build market-specific dashboards that give interconnection managers or business development teams at-a-glance insight into key vitals for a given market. You could also create a dashboard that allows users to cycle through their markets to inspect a given information-set for each market, like connectivity mix (transit, peering, etc.) by PoP, as shown below.

Given the utility of Custom Geo, we also have plans to extend it into the realm of domestic markets, allowing ISPs to configure markets based on Regions (i.e. sub-countries, like states in the US). For additional information, please see the Custom Geo article in our Knowledge Base or contact our Customer Success team.