Kentik has always supported metric options to count unique source and destination IPs in each row of a query response. We’ve now added a new metric that shows the average bit rate (Mbps) per unique IP. This metric is particularly useful to examine if and when an issue is arising. Here are a couple of examples:

• Find the Average Mbps per Destination towards subscribers in a specific last mile aggregate of their traffic. The aggregate can be easily described in a Custom Dimension matching traffic based on a set of CMTS or DSLAM local loop aggregators, or even more simply just a Site.
• To look at traffic towards subscribers for a given Internet Access Plan. The Plan aggregation level can also be a Custom Dimension based on CIDRs. In this case, users are assigned to specific CIDRs in the IPAM based on their plan.

This “Bitrate Per IP” can be found in the Data Explorer under both “Source IPs” and “Destination IPs”:

This feature works best when paired with Kentik’s ability to detect Over The Top (OTT) services, to display Average/Max/95-99p of the Bitrate for each individual OTT service. For video-based OTT services, we now have a scalable way to calculate Average Bitrate across subscriber sets. As a result, ISPs are now able to track subscriber experience for important content sources.

Let’s look at an example content provider (OTT Service) that has their own CDN and also embeds caches within the ISP network. We’ll compare performance (Mbps per subscriber) for traffic sourced from On-Net Caches vs the OTT service’s CDN.

First, we use filters to set these criteria:

Second, we’ll use a Filter-Based Dimension to compare two time series: Traffic from embedded local caches vs Traffic served from the Content Provider’s own Network and off-net caches (i.e., long-tail content):

Lastly, we’ll select the new “95th Bitrate by Destination IP” metric:

The resulting chart below clearly confirms the assumption that the video traffic coming from On-Net Embedded Caching Servers has a higher Bitrate than the long tail traffic coming from Off-Net Caching Servers in Content Provider’s CDN.

For more information, please contact our Customer Success team.