Today we're releasing one of AI Advisor's first Write features: a feature that allows it to create objects in your Kentik Portal configuration.

When AI Advisor launched, its initial scope was to help network operators understand and gain insights on their network data faster, whether during a routine investigation or planning exercise or troubleshooting a critical network outage. It was intentionally limited in scope to reading network data, with no ability to make changes. Today marks the first release of a new family of AI Advisor capabilities to help you configure Kentik itself and accelerate onboarding.

Let's take a look at it!

How does it work ?

Let's just ask AI Advisor, shall we?

So all we have to do is prompt AI Advisor to create a site by submitting its main attributes – to double-check which attributes we can set at creation time, let's just ask it again.

Starting with a simple example, note how it will always ask for permission to create, edit, or delete any object in Kentik Portal via a Human in the Loop (HITL) prompt.

What about batch creating sites?

While creating Sites with AI Advisor  in Kentik Portal is neat, what we really want it to do is speed up onboarding (i.e. to create multiple sites in one go).

Good news: AI Advisor can do that!

All we have to do is submit the content of a CSV file that has a row for each site. Here's an example with three sites and a header row that names the fields:

"site name","address_street","address_zipcode","address_country_2_letter","address_region","site_type","site_market","peeringdb_fac"

"[test] CDG Telehouse 2","137 boulevard Voltaire","75011","FR","Île de France","Connectivity","test_site_market","53"

"[test] CDG Equinix PA3","114 rue Ambroise Croizat","93200","FR","Île de France","Connectivity","test_site_market","717"

"[test] LYS Free Pro Lyon Rock","60 Avenue Rockfeller","69008","FR","Rhone Alpes","Connectivity","test_site_market","6976"

This results in the successful creation of three sites, with a single HITL confirmation prompt to confirm.

Taking site creation to the next level: Combining AI Advisor tools

Let's imagine we have all our sites registered in PeeringDB as Facilities. The good news is that AI Advisor can access a tool (to be announced in a separate article) with access to the entire up-to-date PeeringDB data.

So we can ask questions such as:

...and follow up with a request to create them in Kentik.

And voila!

Customers love to talk to us about AI traffic. It's not surprising: generative AI applications like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are not-so-secretly reshaping your network’s bandwidth and traffic dynamics. And it has been frustratingly common for AI traffic to get dumped into generic "unclassified" buckets, making basic capacity planning and performance optimization an uphill battle. That's why we’re thrilled to announce AI Platforms as a dedicated category within Kentik’s OTT Service Tracking workflow! Kentik now identifies and classifies traffic from 35+ top generative AI services across 28 providers—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Perplexity—giving you granular, real-time visibility into the exact AI workloads crossing your network.

Classifying AI Platforms and Services

By extending our True Origin engine and intelligent classification to the AI ecosystem, you can now track top AI services and providers by bitrates across every connectivity type (transit, interconnect, peering, embedded cache, etc.), drill deep into flow data via Data Explorer, and capacity plan before edge bottlenecks happen.

• Visibility Across Services and Providers: In the OTT Service Tracking workflow, you can pinpoint top AI platforms and providers, compare traffic bitrates, delivery methods, and inbound delivery paths.
• Granular Deep-Dives in Data Explorer: In Data Explorer, you can slice flow data by OTT Service Category = AI Platforms, group by service/provider, and evaluate average, 95th-percentile, or peak traffic across specific interfaces, source CDNs, and ASNs.
• Ask Questions via AI Advisor: Ask AI Advisor which AI services grew fastest this month or perform delivery path analysis based on a specific provider.

Check out our announcement blog post for a further deep dive into this new capability. 

If you're an existing customer of Service Provider Analytics, log in to the Kentik portal, navigate to Service Provider > OTT Service Tracking, and select the AI Platforms category to explore your live data today.

We are thrilled to drop a powerful batch of pre-configured Alert Policy Templates designed to level up your network defense, compliance posture, and threat visibility in a flash! Whether you are defending high-capacity service provider backbones, managing complex enterprise environments, or squashing aggressive DDoS vectors, we've got you covered.

Here is everything you need to know about what’s new, why it matters, and how you can tune these shiny new templates to fit your environment like a glove!

⚡ What’s New?

We’ve added 10 brand-new out-of-the-box policy templates targeting high-impact security risks, advanced carpet bombing tactics, and specialized outbound threats:

🛡️ Outbound Security & DDoS Vectors (Built for Service Providers & Complex Enterprise Networks)

Outbound threats are notoriously tricky for large-scale environments. Unmonitored outbound floods can quickly degrade upstream peering links, harm your IP reputation, or lead to costly transit overages. We’ve added dedicated templates specifically engineered for these topologies:

• DDoS: Outbound Volumetric UDP Flood
  Catches internal source IPs or interface blocks generating abnormal outbound UDP traffic volumes. Crucial for service providers to spot compromised subscriber hosts or internal systems participating in outbound reflection/DDoS attacks before they disrupt transit capacity.
• DDoS: Outbound TCP SYN Flood
  Detects sudden spikes in outbound TCP packets with only the SYN flag set originating from your internal IP space. Protects your brand reputation by catching compromised hosts launching outbound SYN floods.
• Security: Internal Vertical IP Scanning
  Spots lateral movement and reconnaissance across complex networks by alerting when a single internal source IP attempts to sweep across an unusually high number of unique destination IPs.
• Security: Threat Feed Compromised Hosts
  Flags internal network assets actively communicating with external threat infrastructure mapped directly against Spamhaus Botnet C&C nodes and malicious hosts.

🌐 Advanced Carpet Bombing Defense

Modern DDoS attacks don't always target a single IP with massive traffic—they scatter traffic across whole subnets to bypass traditional single-target thresholds. These templates give you multi-layered coverage against distributed attacks:

• DDoS: Carpet Bombing CIDR Aggregation
  Identifies horizontal carpet bombing attacks spread across broad subnets, aggregating volumetric anomalies at the /24 routing prefix level.
• DDoS: Carpet Bombing Port Fragmentation
  Detects fragmented, high-intensity stateless traffic (UDP, ICMP, reflection vectors) aimed at a wide array of destination IPs across a single target service port.
• DDoS: Carpet Bombing Interface Impact
  Acts as an essential safety net by tracking traffic anomalies distributed across an entire downstream customer or internal interface block.

🔒 Geo-Compliance & Sanction Monitoring

• Security: Embargoed Country Traffic (Tier 1)
  Monitors bidirectional traffic touching comprehensively embargoed nations and disputed territories to immediately flag high-risk compliance violations.
• Security: Sanctioned Country Traffic (Tier 2) & Regime-Targeted Traffic (Tier 3)
  Provides granular compliance tracking for high-risk, sanctioned, or UN-embargoed jurisdictions across secondary tiers.

🎯 Why This Matters to You

• Instant Protection, Zero Setup Hassle: No need to build complex flow filters or mathematical baseline models from scratch. These templates come with industry-tested baselines and static thresholds.
• Protect Your Brand & Transit Capacity: For Service Providers and Enterprise Edge networks, catching outbound malicious floods ensures your IP space stays off global blocklists and preserves upstream provider SLAs.
• Defend Against Stealthy Distributed DDoS: By aggregating traffic across /24 subnets, service ports, and entire interface blocks, you can stop carpet bombing campaigns that traditionally slip under single-IP alert radars.
• Automated Regulatory Compliance: Maintain strict, automated compliance oversight against international sanction lists without setting up manual geo-fencing rules.

🛠️ How to Enable & Tune Policies for Your Network

By default, these templates are imported in a disabled state so you can safely review and tune them before going live.

Step 1: Enable the Template

1. Head over to Alerting > Manage Alert Policies > Alert Policy Templates in the Kentik portal.
2. Search for the template name (e.g., DDoS: Outbound Volumetric UDP Flood or DDoS: Carpet Bombing CIDR Aggregation).
3. Then click the “Create policy from template” icon to add the alert policy to your account.

Step 2: Tailor & Tune to Your Environment

Every network has its own unique baseline. Here is how you can make these templates fit seamlessly:

Adjust Static & Baseline Thresholds:

• For high-volume service provider backbones, you can scale up static packet/bit thresholds to match your transit capacities.
• For tight enterprise environments, lower the required percentage jump above historical baselines.

Refine Traffic Filters & Boundaries:

• Ensure your network boundary tags (e.g., internal vs external, or inside vs outside) are accurately defined so outbound flood and lateral scanning policies evaluate traffic correctly.

Attach Notifications & Automated Mitigations:

• Link your team's preferred notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, Webhooks, or Email) under the policy's Notifications section.
• For DDoS templates, attach Mitigation Associations if you want Kentik Protect to automatically trigger RTBH, BGP Flowspec, or third-party mitigation platforms upon activation

Deploying a fleet of Universal Agents should be fast to automate and safe to hand off, and provisioning tokens make it both. Deploying Universal Agents at scale should be easy to automate and safe to delegate. Provisioning tokens make both possible.

Today we're introducing provisioning tokens for the Universal Agent, a controlled way to register agents through the API. Each token is scoped to a single organization, capped to the number of agents you plan to deploy, and set to expire on a schedule you choose. This lets partner teams and systems integrators deploy agents without portal access or long-lived credentials. Agents register themselves on first boot, and you choose whether they come online automatically or wait for an admin to authorize them.

Bring a whole fleet online without the portal: Create one token, deploy your agents, and let them register and authorize themselves over the API.

• Let partners deploy into a customer org safely: Each token belongs to a single organization and a short time window, so you decide how many agents can join and for how long.
• Script the path from install to running capabilities: Register an agent, authorize it, and turn on capabilities like Flow Proxy and SNMP/ST in one automated run.
• Keep tokens low risk: Set a usage count, give the token a short expiry, and revoke it once your agents are in.

What's changed in the install flow

The Deploy Agent command in Settings » Universal Agents now bundles your company ID and a provisioning token. When the agent starts, it reads those values (K_COMPANY_ID and K_REGISTER_PROVISIONING_TOKEN) and registers on its own. With an auto-approve token, the agent comes online with a status of Up and nobody has to open the portal to authorize it. If you prefer a checkpoint, an approval-required token leaves each agent Not Authorized until an admin clicks Authorize.

What's new

Provisioning tokens are short-lived, organization-scoped credentials you create through the kagent API, or with the generate-provisioning-token.sh helper in the kagent-helm repository. Each token specifies how many agents can register and when the token expires, allowing you to generate credentials just before deployment instead of storing a long-lived secret.

The same token-based flow works whether you install on standalone Linux or Docker or deploy with the kagent-helm chart on Kubernetes. In every case, the agent picks up the token from an environment variable and registers itself, and you can update the token value later without reinstalling the agent.

Once an agent is registered, you can finish onboarding without the portal. Authorize the agent, enable capabilities by name (kproxy, ktraffic, ranger, kdns), and apply runtime configuration, all through the kagent API. US deployments use grpc.api.kentik.com and EU deployments use grpc.api.kentik.eu.

Why it matters

For a proof of value, this removes a major source of friction. A partner or system integrator can deploy agents into a prospect's organization and have them register and start reporting, without waiting for portal access to be granted. The onboarding steps that used to be manual are now scriptable, so the same process covers one Docker host or a Helm-managed fleet.

You also keep control of exposure. Because a token is tied to one organization, capped by a usage count, and set to expire on a schedule you choose, an agent can only ever join the organization that issued its token. There is no way to move a registered agent from one organization into another, so identities stay clean when you stage in your own org before deploying to a customer's.

Get started

Ready to onboard agents without the portal bottleneck? Open Settings » Universal Agents » Deploy Agent to copy an install command that already includes your company ID and a provisioning token. To create tokens inside an automation script, call the kagent provisioning-tokens API directly, or use the generate-provisioning-token.sh helper in the kagent-helm chart if you deploy on Kubernetes. The Universal Agents guide in our Knowledge Base has the full walkthrough for registration, authorization, and capability configuration.

Since we released our AI Advisor agent, we've been noticing a steady and consistent increase of its usage throughout our user base. When discussing with our customers to understand how they use it, we usually notice a couple things:

• More often than not, a few champions within the company use AI Advisor in a rather advanced fashion, chaining prompts that leverage different data-sets;
• The rest of the users mostly use AI Advisor in a one-shot pattern of question, answer, then move on.

Some of our key conclusions are

1. AI (Advisor) is a muscle: unless you keep exercising it and attempt new prompts, it is hard for users to wrap their heads around what AI Advisor can do that they haven't yet discovered
2. Emulation is key to adoption: constant exposure to successful/fruitful AI Advisor sessions is a big factor for internal adoption, and helps users develop a sense of the "field of the possibles" in terms of its usage
3. Sometimes (often) you need to share things with non Kentik users: Whether attaching investigation context for post-incident reporting, or sharing a network planning exercise with others in the organization, we see many needs to be able to create a sharable, portable artifact that is better than "copy & paste."

For that reason, we're adding a couple features for users to share sessions recorded as PDF.

Export AI Advisor chat sessions as PDF

Title says it all: with this function, users can now download any chat session, current or past as a PDF file and share it with other users.

When using AI Advisor in the chat popover mode, you'll notice these series of icons in the title bar, one of them will download the current chat session as a PDF

When using AI Advisor in Full screen mode, 

In both cases, a green toast will let you know when your export is ready with a link to save it as a PDF

Cranking it up a notch: Scheduled Export Subscriptions

This is when things get interesting: building on this foundation, we added a capability for AI Advisor to run offline, on a schedule.
First off head to Company Settings > Reports Subscriptions

AI Advisor

which will give you access to configuration options for your scheduled AI Advisor Report

• Naming the PDF file exported
• Email recipients to configure it for (TO, CC, BCC)
• Scheduling options (daily, weekly, monthly, last day of the month)
• A field for the prompt you want AI Advisor to run and export as a PDF

Here's an idea of how we've seen this feature being used: 

1. Schedule a report to be run every Monday morning and set to your inbox
2. Configure the report to rely on the following prompt: 

"Give me a summary of anything critical that has happened over the past weekend, only display a table of summary action items, each one with their level of priority"

Here's an extract of a sample report you could receive in your inbox after a busy weekend

...another example, derived from this one:

• Network Config Changes made over the weekend can be seen as riskier because of only On-Call staff being available to review them
• Sometimes these changes are made in emergency to temporarily solve a customer issue and need to be reviewed on Monday when all the engineering staff is present
• Kentik's NMS offering now by default includes Config Back and Diff'ing for devices enrolled in it, meaning AI Advisor knows about any change made at anytime, by anyone.

What about getting a weekend config change summary on Monday delivered to the Engineering team's inbox to review ?

A scheduled prompt like this one would do the trick

"Show me a summary of all device config changes that have happened over the weekend on all devices, including who made the change

Which would yield a PDF report similar to the one below

How do I make the best use of AI Advisor Scheduled Reports?

This feature really shines when used in conjunction with our AI Runbooks (see the AI Advisor release announcement): with Runbooks, our users can instruct AI Advisor to follow a specific procedure, featuring

• Natural language instructions that mirror your own operating procedures
• A step by step detailed reasoning containing what data-sets to pull into an investigation: traffic analysis queries, NMS metrics, Syslog and Trap event entries, on-demand synthetic tests, configuration backups diffs and even run show commands
• Title and Description metadata, leveraged by AI Advisor to know when to dynamically summon them

Concretely, if you're a Claude Code user, you can think of these as Claude Skills.

These capabilities now can get leveraged offline with AI Advisor Subscription Reports with prompts such as:

Execute the "NTP and Syslog audit" Runbook

In that example, AI Advisor would fetch the Runbook and execute the instructions in it, turning it into a powerful audit tool that will be summoned regularly, sending your Engineering/Operations team a report with actions for them to review and apply.

You'll notice a name change in your Universal Agent settings: Flow Proxy is now Flow Proxy (Edge Processing). The engine, configuration, and behavior are identical. Nothing breaks, nothing migrates. We're updating the name because Flow Proxy is growing into a collection of modes, and we want the labels to be clear about what each one does.

• Nothing changes operationally. Your existing Flow Proxy capability continues to decode, enrich, and sample flow at the edge exactly as it does today.
• The name tells you what it does. "Edge Processing" makes it explicit that this mode handles decoding and enrichment locally before forwarding to Kentik.
• A new collection mode is coming alongside it. Flow Proxy (Forwarding), a lightweight forwarding engine, is entering limited release for select customers. The name change keeps the two engines distinct.

What's new?

Flow Proxy (Edge Processing) is the engine you already run. It decodes, enriches (SNMP/rDNS), and samples flow at the edge before forwarding to Kentik. Same binary, same config, same behavior. The label in the Universal Agent UI now reads "Flow Proxy (Edge Processing)" instead of "Flow Proxy."

Flow Proxy (Forwarding) is a new, separate capability entering limited release. It captures raw flow and ships it to Kentik with minimal local processing, using roughly 10x less compute than edge decoding. SaaS-side enrichment only available in Edge Processing today is in active development for Forwarding Mode to complement it. This is available to select customers today; broader availability will follow.

What this means for Flow Proxy users

If you run Flow Proxy today, here's what to expect going forward:

1. Now: You'll see the updated name in your Universal Agent settings. No action required.
2. Soon: Flow Proxy (Forwarding) becomes available more broadly as a separate capability for select customers who want lightweight collection without edge enrichment.
3. Next: We're building a unified Flow Proxy experience that combines both engines into a single capability with a mode selector. Instead of managing two separate capabilities on your agents, you'll pick a delivery mode from one place. Fewer capabilities to configure, fewer to monitor, and a clear path to switch between engines as your needs change.

Here is an early view into a prototype we've been working on for mode selection (this is early work and subject to change):

If you run Kproxy (legacy) as a standalone agent today you should still be planning to migrate to a Universal Agent Flow Proxy by the May 1, 2027 deprecation date as previously announced to avoid running unmaintained agents and to benefit from our latest innovations. 

No action required

No action is needed. The name update is already live in the Universal Agent for all customers. We will be posting a follow up announcement once the unified Flow Proxy experience is live. 

"Portal won't even load for me," said the SRE manager, Jim-bob, frantically looking at a series of alerts cascading through his observability tool. In the Slack war room, the pressure was mounting. 

"Is this a synth issue or a network issue?" he asked—the classic question that marks the beginning of every high-stakes triage.

Across the virtual table, Ally, the network architect, was digging into the charts. "Why so many that say Tokyo?" she muttered, staring at a sea of overlapping lines. The team was drowning in raw data, but they were missing the story.

What's New?

To solve these high-pressure moments, we’re thrilled to announce the enhanced Investigative Capabilities of AI Advisor (AIA). AI Advisor now has the power to act as your primary on-call investigator, correlating Synthetics monitoring with real-time BGP telemetry. Instead of you manually hunting for common denominators across different ephemeral queries or consoles, AIA looks at your global agent network, analyzes the routing paths, and builds a definitive root-cause report and complete with path visualizations, directly in the chat.

Why It Matters

This update turns AIA into a collaborative partner that solves the "unknown network change" by following the evidence:

• AI Assisted Triangulation: During the triage, Ally and Jim-bob were overwhelmed by "Tokyo" alerts. AIA cut through the noise by identifying that geographically diverse agents (Cloud-A/Chicago, Cloud-B/Tokyo, Cloud-C/London) all shared one thing in common: their traffic routed through a specific upstream transit path. AIA can now build these path-dependency diagrams on the fly, helping describe transit-layer issues in a context that is easier for NOC and network engineers to understand and act upon.
• Exposing the "Connected Route" Trap: One of the most dangerous false signals is a healthy P2P link. AI Advisor identified that while an upstream p2p interface remained reachable with 0% packet loss, it was a "false friend." Because that subnet was a connected route, the link stayed up even as the provider’s backbone lost the ability to route traffic to Kentik's actual service prefixes (193.177.*.*/24). AIA accurately identified that the physical wire was fine, but the routing was broken.

• Correlating BGP Churn in Real-Time: AI Advisor doesn't just look at pings; it looks across the data you’ve collected with Kentik. In our case, it identified a massive BGP UPDATE storm of 158k messages, roughly 148x the normal churn rate, detected on a specific transit path. By linking this routing instability directly to the Synthetics packet loss, AI Advisor (AIA) gives you the data-driven evidence you need to coordinate with partners and resolve path-specific issues.

*note this image is an anonymized recreation based on the original

• Depth Without the Drama: No more fighting with your dashboard while on the move. The updated UDE Table Renderers ensure that whether you're at a dual-monitor workstation or triaging on the go like Jim-Bob, the critical path data and cloud provider info are front and center.

Get Started! Ready to find your Mean Time to Innocence? Head to the Synthetics section in the Kentik portal to explore the new trace tool, or ask AI Advisor to "analyze the latest packet loss spike" to see the triangulation diagram in action. For a deep dive into the technical specs, visit our Knowledge Base.

On May 8, 2026, during a scheduled maintenance window at 2AM UTC, Kentik will introduce an F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) in front of our US SaaS platform (portal.kentik.com / api.kentik.com).  This is part of our commitment to continual improvement and defense in depth strategy to secure our systems in the face of novel, AI-assisted attack chains. (Note - As part of our initial deployment, this change took effect in EU SaaS on April 22, 2026)

What's changing

All HTTPS traffic to portal.kentik.com,  api.kentik.com (including *.my.kentik.com, beta.kentik.com & next.kentik.com), and the corresponding .eu domains, now routes through the F5 WAF at 159.60.158.89 before reaching Kentik infrastructure. This provides enhanced protection against malicious web application traffic and attacks with no change to the portal or API functionality.

What's not changing

• Our SaaS platform remains hosted with its data stored in our co-location facility in Ashburn, Virginia for our US and Frankfurt, Germany for EU.
• Flow ingest data (NetFlow/IPFIX/sFlow packets) sent to collector IPs is unaffected.
  (Note: However, some kproxy management/health calls, ksynth result uploads and, any customer scripts calling our API  — now routes through the WAF)

Action required

Action only required if you have outbound IP allowlists. If your proxies, firewalls or other routing policies restrict outbound HTTPS (port 443) to Kentik by IP, you must add 159.60.158.89 alongside the existing Kentik VIPs. Without this, portal and API access may be blocked from your network.

Data Processing Notes

F5 Data Processing

• Requests will be processed by F5’s regional endpoints based on where they originate.
• F5 is a member of the US DPF program & shares our overall GDPR commitment, so this change should not introduce novel data locality concerns. 
• WAF performs transient analysis of user requests hitting the SaaS website only and is not used to process network telemetry data (such as NetFlow) sent to our servers. Furthermore, F5 does not store any user request data post-processing. As a result, we determined that this does not meet our criteria for declaring F5 as a full subprocessor working with customer personal data.

Private Network Interconnect (PNI)

• If you have a private network interconnect (PNI) configured to Kentik with the portal/API being accessed via the PNI. Then with the WAF in place, portal and API access will be routed via F5’s regional edges over the internet. (Note: This is only for web traffic and, Flow/ingest data will still continue to go over the PNI)

Additional F5 information

• F5 Data Protection:  https://www.f5.com/company/trust-center/general-data-protection-regulation-and-data-protection-framework
• F5 Regional Edge Locations: https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000146743 
• F5 Regional Edge IP ranges: https://docs.cloud.f5.com/docs-v2/downloads/platform/reference/network-cloud-ref/ips-domains.txt 

If you have any questions regarding this, please reach out to Kentik support or your customer success advisor.

Network problems happen all the time, but the hardest part isn't detection. It's getting to the why. Detection is easy, but diagnosis is not. Observability has gotten incredibly good at detecting issues and narrowing down the problem space. But actually diagnosing the network and finding the root cause? That is still painfully manual.

Engineers often need to look at multiple tools, dashboards and CLIs to get to root cause. Introducing, Kentik's new AI diagnostics for faster root-cause analsys! By bringing diagnostic tools-of-the-trade directly into your telemetry and alerting workflows, you can stop the swivel-chair investigation and confirm root causes faster.

Here are three new capabilities launching today to help you streamline troubleshooting:

On-Demand Connectivity Tests

Need to confirm an issue from a specific vantage point? You can now use AI Advisor to validate reachability and path behavior from Universal Agents. This allows you to test and confirm network issues exactly where they matter most to your end-users.

📝 Config Context (Backups + Diffs)

Configuration changes are a leading cause of network incidents. Kentik NMS now periodically captures running configs over SSH, securely stores them as secret-redacted backups, and surfaces diffs between revisions. Even better: AI Advisor can instantly analyze these backups and diffs to answer questions about configuration states and identify if a recent change is the culprit behind your current issue.

💻 SSH Command Access

When an investigation requires live device data, the usual answer is to pull up a CLI and start digging. Now, you can do it right from AI Advisor. AI Advisor can propose, run, and analyze read-only show commands directly inside your investigation thread.

• No memorizing vendor syntax: AI Advisor handles the complex commands.
• No context switching: Keep your CLI output and your telemetry in the same window.
• Empower your team: Junior or less specialized staff can safely troubleshoot complex issues and correlate live device truth with ease.

Ready to see it in action?

Monitor your devices with NMS, configure SSH access and start solving problems faster today. There's no "upcharge" for this new feature. It's included with an NMS device license. Need more details? Check out our knowledge base article and release blog.

Observation Deck was initially built as a flexible landing page that adapts to users' interest. It includes a library of widgets that aren't available as Data/Metrics Explorer views, but also allows our users to embed views from these two key Infrastructure Analytics query applications. In its initial design, there was only one Observation Deck per user, and no ability for a group of users to share the same.

Discussions with our user base led to these requirements:

• the ability to build and then share Observation Decks across users;
• the ability to share an Observation Deck with users based on their assigned role, serving as a role-specific landing page for the tasks & checks that their roles demand
• the ability to centrally manage Observation Decks assignments as landing pages for different user groups

So... that's what this update is about! Read on! At the end of the article, we'll also share our vision of how Observation Decks and Dashboards will evolve in the short/mid/long term future, so make sure you review the last section.

Introducing the new observation decks

Observation Decks are now their own Library objects

If you go to the Library ([shift]+[s] from any screen in Kentik Portal, one of those magic shortcuts you want to know about) you will notice that the left-side filter panel now offers an additional choice for Type:

This means that you can now create multiple Observation Decks. Here's a few things about how it works:

• These Observation Decks are bound to the same RBAC rules as Dashboards: Shared vs Private settings supersede any RBAC permissions - a new RBAC section allows you to configure permissions for Observation Decks the same way that exists with Dashboards, including per-label permissions

• Important note: This doesn't replace or delete your existing Observation Deck; it has been simply been migrated to a Library object for you so you won't need to re-create it
  • The migrated Observation Decks are Private meaning you only will see them if you had one
  • You can change their share settings and they will then appear to other users in the Library (barring RBAC permissions) - ideally you should change their names before sharing them so you don't end up with multiple titled Observation Deck, each with a different owner

• If your Kentik Portal Landing page was an Observation Deck, the record has been updated in your settings, pointing to the same, migrated library object, which should result in no change to your experience upon login - see section in this article about Observation Deck assignments

A complete overhaul of Observation Deck editing capabilities

With this update, you'll find the previous ability to add widgets from a selection of existing ones with in the + Add Panel dropdown at the top:

We have now made editing Observation Deck simpler - let's go through a few useful changes that we've added:

Edit in place

All Observation Deck panel titles, as well as the main title are now editable in place: hovering on these titles highlights them, clicking loads an inline edit field.

New top level widget types

New widgets have been released that have long been asked by our users:

• Section widget
• Markdown text panel widget

The Section Widget lets you create sections to group panels in and make long Observation Decks easier for the users to consume - see below:

Conveniently, sections are also collapsible/expandable, as shown below:

Markdown Text panels are another addition making this Observation Deck update exciting, look for yourself in the screenshot below.

A couple tricks that we've found very useful when using markdown panels:

• use emojis to display clear do's and don'ts type of instructions
• use arrow characters in the titles to point at a nearby panel if you want to provide an inline explanation to them
• don't hesitate to abuse URL embedding, even if these don't point to wiki documentation: non-public URLs are OK as long as the consuming user has access to the resource the URL points to (private wikis are fine)
• a full library of markdown examples is available here, don't hesitate to steal ideas from it to make your Observation Decks more lively

Central management of Observation Decks as Landing Page experiences

To further Observation Deck's usefulness and make them more manageable at scale in the case of user groups with different demands in Kentik Portal, we've extended management capabilities throughout the Settings experience.

Per user assignment of Observation Deck as a Landing Page

If your user permissions allows it, you can now assign Landing Pages to users yourself (it used to be a user private setting).

In the Company Settings > Users > Edit User workflow, you'll now be able to set a specific Observation Deck as a landing page for any user:

Beyond that, you'll also be able to leverage Bulk Edit capabilities from the same Users management page to assign the same Observation Deck to multiple users at the same time in one fell swoop!

SSO Role-Sets and the associated Landing Page

Some of our users use SSO RBAC Automated Attribute Mapping via Role Sets (see the announcement here): this feature allows Kentik Administrator to set RBAC permissions and enforce them at login based on users' SAML2 attributes, including User Groups.

In that context, a Role-Set is a collection of roles assigned by SSO at login, and it now contains a setting to assign a specific landing page: each who has been assigned a Role-Set containing a Landing Page setting will now default to the selected Landing Page, where a named Observation Deck can be configured, as shown below.

User API extensions for Observation Decks as a Landing Page

Some users prefer relying on programmatic capabilities to set up users using our API - for those we've also extended the User API endpoints to include setting an Observation Deck as a landing page programmatically

What is the future of Dashboards and Observation Decks ?

As a lot of you have already pointed out, Observation Decks and Dashboards are very similar. For example, a lot of our users have asked for an ability to add Observation Deck widgets to Dashboards.

Additionally, we have determined that Dashboards have a high barrier to entry for our newer users, and are too involved to Create or Edit.

For both these reasons, we will merge Observation Decks and Dashboards together in the near future. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of what you can expect:

• All existing Observation Decks will be migrated to dashboards
• The new Dashboards experience will inherit the newer, simplified Edit/Create User Experience of Observation Deck (ex: Edit Mode is permanent, no need to toggle View/Edit mode to make layout changes etc...)
• Existing Observation Deck widgets will by default be available in the new Dashboards experience
• The new Dashboards experience will include all the data-sets that you can add to Kentik: Traffic(Flow), NMS(Metrics), Synthetics, Events...
• The new Dashboards experience will see its Guided Mode powers significantly overhauled and improved to make interactive dashboards a point of focus for creators

Last but not least, we have a long term project to sprinkle AI magic over these new dashboards getting dashboard creation a step closer to true Generative AI!

Tell us what you'd like to see in these future dashboards, it's never to late to get involved in the future of Kentik Portal and we love sourcing our future improvements from our users themselves!