We're thrilled to announce a significant upgrade to the Knowledge Base (KB), designed to help you find information about Kentik’s powerful Network Intelligence features more efficiently than ever before. While you'll still access the KB at https://kb.kentik.com, we've made substantial enhancements to deliver a truly new and improved experience.

What's New and Improved?

So. Many. Things.

Search

We wanted an easier path to Kentik product knowledge, so we added these search enhancements:

• Search the entire KB at once: Platform, Portal, and in the near future, API documentation
• Search KB content from the Kentik Portal via Journeys
• Search with natural language questions

Streamlined Access to Information

Navigating the KB is now easier than ever:

• The redesigned “Explore Articles” sidebar simplifies your learning and troubleshooting journeys. 
• The “In This Article” table of contents now has an improved layout and automatically highlights where you are in the article.
• Next/Previous Article buttons, Feedback, and Related Articles at the bottom of every article
• Recently Modified, Recently Created, and Most Viewed article lists on the home page

A Modern, Intuitive Experience

It might have been overdue, but we think you’re gonna love these:

• Refreshed look and feel
• More variety of visual elements like callouts, accordions, tabs, and videos
• Ability to copy code blocks with a single click
• Choice of Dark/Light/Auto themes

We are committed to continuously improving your experience with Kentik, and this Knowledge Base evolution is a key part of that commitment. Dive in and explore the enhanced capabilities  at https://kb.kentik.com and let us know how it goes!

We're excited to announce a major enhancement to Kentik's Traffic Costs feature, giving you even deeper insights into where and how your network spend is occurring. Two months ago we released Traffic Costs, an industry-first automated workflow enabling customers to instantly calculate how much various slices of network traffic were contributing to connectivity costs. https://new.kentik.com/unveiling-hidden-network-costs-introducing-traffic-costs-1yRCxi

And now with this exciting enhancement, you can analyze traffic costs across multiple new, powerful dimensions. The original Source/Destination ASN, AS Group, and AS Path as well as the Customer Port traffic slices are still available, and now you can analyze network spend based on:

• CDN Provider: Understand costs by content delivery network to manage efficiency and performance, and negotiate better rates.
• OTT Service, Provider, and Category: Get granular visibility into costs by Over-the-Top (OTT) traffic, including specific services and content categories.
• Geographic Areas:  Break down costs by country, region, and city to identify cost drivers by location.
• IP/CIDR Blocks:  Attribute costs directly to specific IP addresses or CIDR ranges for precise accounting and planning.

You’ll see all the new dimensions listed under Create a New Estimate on the Traffic Costs page.

For example, in this screenshot we can easily calculate and see how much it’s costing my network to receive traffic from Netflix every month and deliver to my subscribers. 

And in this example, we’re looking at how much it’s costing my network to send traffic to Akamai each month. 

These new traffic slices provide the actionable intelligence you need to optimize network spend across the business, improve traffic engineering, and strengthen cost accountability.  Log in to the Kentik portal to explore the new capabilities today!

Coming Wednesday (July 16, 2025):

We are excited to announce powerful new enhancements to our NMS product, bringing more security and flexibility to your SNMP data collection. You now have access to stronger encryption for SNMPv3, better polling setting defaults and advanced controls to fine-tune polling behavior for every device in your network.

Enhanced SNMPv3 Security

Security is paramount, which is why we’ve added support for the following, more secure SNMPv3 protocols:

• Authentication Protocols: SHA-512 & SHA-128
• Privacy (Encryption) Protocol: AES-256

SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) are both cryptographic algorithms, but they serve different purposes. SHA is a hashing algorithm used for creating a unique fingerprint of data, while AES is an encryption algorithm used to scramble data so it can only be read with a key.

This allows you to secure your network management traffic with the latest standards.

Important: Please note that these new security protocols are available for NMS data collection performed by the Universal Agent (UA). They do not apply to KProxy-based flow enrichment.

A Look Ahead: Our Unified Agent Strategy

The Universal Agent (UA) is the future of data collection at Kentik. Our long-term plan is to consolidate all SNMP and Streaming Telemetry collection into the Universal Agent, which will handle both NMS metric collection and flow enrichment. Features such as our topology maps, capacity planning, cost analysis, and traffic engineering are currently powered by our KProxy agent only, but will be served by Universal Agent’s NMS capability in the future. By focusing our development on the UA, we can deliver enhancements like these new security protocols more quickly and efficiently. It will also importantly resolve issues with double-polling currently caused by separate agents for flow enrichment and NMS collection. 

Granular Control Over Polling

Now available when configuring NMS Monitoring Templates, Polling Options gives you gives you the flexibility to fine-tune polling behavior, balancing performance and speed of telemetry to your specific needs:

• Max OIDs per Request: Adjust the number of OIDs (Object Identifiers) the agent requests at one time. This applies to SNMP v2c and v3 only.
• Request Retries: Set how many times the agent will retry a failed request.
• Timeout: Define how long the agent will wait for a response before timing out.
• Parallel Requests: Control the number of simultaneous polling requests (workers) for a single device.

Sensible New Defaults

Based on extensive real-world testing, we’ve also updated the default polling configuration for both existing and newly added devices. Our new approach favors pulling more data in a single request while reducing the number of parallel requests. This has proven to be a more efficient method for the vast majority of network hardware.

Why We Made This Change

Every network is unique, and some devices can be more sensitive to polling than others. While our default settings are designed to work brilliantly for most hardware, these new controls give you the power to ease the polling impact on devices with limited resources or unique configurations. It’s all about providing a powerful, flexible monitoring solution that adapts to your environment.

We're Here to Help!

Not sure what settings are right for your devices? Our Product Support team is ready to assist you in optimizing your new polling configurations. Please don't hesitate to reach out for guidance.

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!

In this post, we'll be covering a feature that was delivered a while back but had the gem of a long-term project hidden in it – and now is the time to talk about it. I'm talking about our (now not so) recently released Kentik NMS product – let's get back to this in a short moment.

Over the years, Kentik has built a number of Agent binaries – each one to carry out a specific function as a Telemetry Agent for its own type of telemetry.

• kproxy lets you proxy flows from inside of your network to our public flow ingest cluster
• kprobe is used as a DNS tap to provide the magic mapping between DNS and Flow records to unlock OTT observability
• kbgp is a local BGP hub, which prolongs your BGP sessions towards our BGP ingest enrichment cluster
• ksynth is the Synthetic Monitoring agent you run (privately) or we run (publicly), which performs Synthetic Tests

You'll notice the one missing here is our SNMP poller: you now see it as what we call a "Capability" of the Universal Agent we released when we unveiled Kentik NMS.

In a nutshell, you install Universal Agent, enable the NMS capability on it and you're off to the races. Hang in there, this is what this post is all about!

Operability challenges of Telemetry Agents

Managing large fleets of telemetry agents always comes with operational complexities – let's lay out a few observations we've made over the years in that field. In everything that follows, "operability" is a key term.

Observable agents

As your Telemetry comes to rely on these agents, they quickly become a critical part of your infrastructure, and therefore now require to be observable – some examples here:

• If a Flow Proxy (currently named kproxy) becomes faulty, users need to be alerted. If they don't, they will assume the trough in their traffic charts is due to a network outage and waste valuable time troubleshooting the situation.
• The team in charge of running your telemetry systems is often a different team than the one building and running the network – while they may not be daily Kentik users, they need to monitor them in a scalable way and reduce the amount of integration work needed to operationalize them. 
• Agents running on a host (virtual or physical) can go wrong for multiple reasons: maybe the host itself is not doing well (i.e. it's not the Agent's fault), maybe the function the Agent performs is not doing well, but the host is doing just fine. In other words, users want self-serviceability when it comes to determining why agents are not doing their job.

Frictionless upgrade path

When running large infrastructure, the last thing engineers want to do is have to upgrade a large fleet of Agents: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is usually the governing principle. Operational realities require the upgrade path to be the most frictionless possible:

• Bug fixes can require upgrading a large fleet of agents – the task of upgrading a large fleet of agents therefore needs to be as frictionless as possible to maintain constant state of operation.
• Availability of new features requiring Telemetry Agent upgrades tend to be delayed in favor of the aforementioned conservative approach.
• Security updates to large Telemetry Agent fleets can get delayed because of upgrades deployment complexity – these are always critical, should always be seamless enough to not incur delays.

Agent proliferation vs. One-size fits all

With the rise of observability, agent proliferation in your infrastructure has been skyrocketing. Each new agent comes with its own upgrade track, bugs, security context... in other words, the operational complexity of one's telemetry setup increases exponentially with the number of agents required to operate one's infrastructure. All telemetry agents share common goals, requirements, and functions: they need to be deployed, monitored, and updated.

The first way that comes to mind to deliver these common functions is to collapse all agents into a single swiss army knife agent: the operational ease of this solution is appealing, but comes with a few significant drawbacks:

• All functions carried by the agent require eventual updates, and having many functions served by a single agent usually results in increasing the frequency at which these need to be updated – depending on the number of functions collapsed together, this often results in a significant increase of update pace, therefore operational tax.
• Each function performed by the agent comes with its own bugs and security weaknesses – collapsing multiple agents in one often result in increasing the bug and security risk per agent.

For the reasons above, the ideal setup is one where we can reap the benefits of both a single agent, while keeping multiple ones at the same time. Let's discuss our new approach to agentry in the next section!

Introducing Universal Agent

What is Universal Agent ?

"One Ring Agent to rule them all, One Ring Agent to find them, One Ring Agent to bring them all, and in the darkness Kentik Platform bind them"

With the aforementioned challenges in mind, our engineering team produced a modular design centered around a new deployable binary, named Universal Agent.

Universal Agent acts as a host governor module (literary pun intended), tasked with offering a common foundation to "capabilities" running under it: it acts as the sole controller towards our SaaS platform, handles the download and enablement of other agents (now named "capabilities"), handles under-the-hood update cadences for both itself and its governed capabilities, and collects/ships not only host-level metrics, but also specific metrics for each capabilities to the Kentik SaaS platform.

What benefits does Universal Agent offer ?

Operational peace of mind
Universal Agent is now the central piece of Kentik's Telemetry Agent strategy. Its setup process is trivial and its enrollment entirely driven by the Kentik Portal UI our users all know and love.

Furthermore, Universal Agent updates are transparently and gracefully managed "under the hood", and the same goes for any Capability run by the agent – little if no operator intervention is now needed to keep an Agent and its Capabilities up to date.

Central management & monitoring
The Settings > Universal Agents now becomes the central place where you will in turn manage your complete Kentik telemetry agent ecosystem. This interface lets you identify any agent or capability deployed on your network and its current running state.

Agent Observability
Each deployed Universal Agent reports host-level metrics, accessible directly from the Settings > Universal Agent screen

As a bonus, all agent host-level metrics are also available in Metrics Explorer under the /kentik/agent measurement tree without any extra work needed. Universal Agents have now become observable, with their vitals now available for dashboarding like any other NMS device.

One single binary to access all of our telemetry collection capabilities
Once it is deployed, Universal Agent gives instant access to all the telemetry functions we've ported over as "capabilities". These get installed and enabled upon simple click. While NMS was the initial capability we shipped Universal Agent with, our entire ecosystem of telemetry agents will follow over time and be integrated as a Capability.

Observability for each Agent Capability
Each enabled Capability comes with its own set of metrics, designed to describe its function. These metrics also get shipped for free to our NMS subsystem and displayed at Agent > Capability level in the Universal Agent Management UI. Again, as these metrics are being stored in our Metrics subsystem, they can be accessed via Metrics Explorer, but also alerted upon.

What's next ?

With this foundation built, we have already started producing new Capabilities leveraging this new model:

• Our newly released Syslog Server is one of these new capabilities
• As part of the same release, we also released a Trap Receiver capability

We've already started porting over our existing Agents to this new "Capability" model – watch this space for more announcements in that field real soon!

Lastly, we will be leveraging our brand new NMS Alerting platform in the very near future to provide automated alerts on Agents and Capabilities Health.

Good news! We’re extending our existing VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding instances) support to include Nokia routers – so if you're using Nokia’s SAP/SDP interfaces, you’ll now get deeper visibility into your VRF traffic, just like you already do with other vendor gear in the Kentik portal. 

A couple of months ago, we announced expanded support for Nokia SAP/SDP – and this latest update builds on that momentum, further extending Kentik’s visibility and insights for Nokia-based networks.

A critical technology of modern networks, VRFs allow multiple, independent routing domains to co-exist within a single router or switch, each with its own set of interfaces, routing protocols, and forwarding policies. This segmentation enhances network security and performance  – especially in multi-tenant and -customer environments – helping isolate traffic, avoid conflicts, and support more efficient routing.

Nokia uses vendor-specific MIBs with their TiMOS OS, which has historically made full visibility a bit tricky. With this update, Kentik now pulls in enhanced flow data for Nokia VRFs, including support for BGP, IPv6, and Ultimate Exit path tracking. That means you can now see where your traffic is actually egressing – even across complex Nokia VRF deployments. 

If you're already using VRFs on Nokia, there's nothing extra to configure – just start using the standard VRF dimensions in Kentik and you’re good to go.

As always, reach out if you have questions or want help digging into your VRF data!

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.

In many areas of the Kentik Portal, users can bundle-select multiple objects to apply common configuration to them. This is a common requirement as soon as your infrastructure reaches a size where you want to manage Cattle over Pets. 

A lot of functionality in Kentik Portal can be performed in batches:

• Bulk actions on Devices (labeling, plan assignment, archive/deletion, Site assignment, NMS Monitoring Template assignment...)
• Bulk actions on Interfaces (Assign Connectivity Type, Network Boundary, Provider/Customer, IX the interface is assigned to...)
• Bulk actions on Sites (Assigning Site Market, Site Type, corresponding PeeringDB Facility...)
• Bulk actions on Synthetic Agents and Synthetic tests (Labeling...)
• and many more areas in Kentik Portal

As we continue to strive to improve the ease of use and operability of our product for users with large herds of infrastructure, we've rolled out a completely new Bulk Edit UX in a limited scope of Kentik Portal to test the better UX with our users. Read on.

A pilot for the Device Screens

As of today, this new Bulk Edit UX is visible in two areas of the product:

• the Device Management screen /v4/infrastructure/devices
• the Device Details > Interfaces tab /v4/infrastructure/devices//interfaces

This new UX wiill appear at the bottom of the devices list as soon as you select two or more devices, for example:

...and will let you modify a certain number of the attributes for this device – more actions will be added to this bulk edit menu as we start hearing feedback from our users.

• Note how the left side of this also allows you to de-select these devices you've selected
• Whenever possible, the individual attribute change will display a search field to immediately find what to set the attribute to
• In the case of labels, where multiple selected devices may not have the same labels, a blue check will be displayed when all selected devices have this label on, whereas a [-] sign will show when only some of the devices have this label on, see below:
  

here all the selected devices have the "Arista" label

Whereas here only some selected devices have the Arista label on

This UX will also display in the Device Details page, as soon as more than one interface is selected:

What comes next

Depending on your feedback with this new UI, we will improve it as we go, but more importantly extend it to all other screens that currently contain bulk edit options in the legacy way we've done it. 

One of the key benefits of leveraging web components in our front-end stack is the ability to drastically reduce the time needed to port this new design over to other parts of the product!

This feature is a small one, but one that has been requested by a deceptively high amount of our users! A lot of screens in Kentik portal let the user scroll through a list of "Objects", and these list views are usually filterable by a variety of attributes that depend on the nature of the object: Interfaces, Devices, Sites, Synthetic Tests, Synthetic Agents... Users have asked us to make it quicker for them to select these objects using combination of labels. Read on !

About a year ago, we released an updated version of our new Role Based Access Control system that leveraged Labels in order to make management of permissions on labels a much more efficient task, where users were now able to apply permissions on collections of Objects (aka Dashboards, Saved Views, Synthetic Monitoring Agents, Synthetic Monitoring Tests, Devices, Credentials ...).
This made Labels in Kentik more valuable, useful, and central to the entire product.

One of the requests that kept coming back to us from our users was the ability for the user in these list-type screens to be able to better filter on either Intersection or Union of labels.
A simple way to look at it, a very common need that surfaced when we released the unified Traffic and NMS Device screens was, for instance: 

Show me all my Routers that both have CDN Caches connected to them AND are used to connect transit providers

A common way for our users to add this metadata to devices would be to leverage the flexibility of Labels – and our new UI allows them to narrow down the list of devices from the Device Management Screen using a logical AND expression in the filter as shown below.

Notice how the top-right of the Label input filter now contains an AND/OR selector ? 
This is how you do it: AND will Intersect all labels in the field, while OR will display the union of objects with the labels in the field.

Going back to our example, this is what it would look like in the Device Management screen:

Another pretty common ask was, for example:

Show me all the Synthetic Tests configured to be used in Production AND built to monitor Kentik Portal

...and in this case, users would also use a set of labels to describe which tests are used by the Production Team, and which tests are focused around monitoring Kentik Portal. Notice how we drink our own champagne in the screenshot below 😉

The Library module in Kentik Portal got a special treatment: remember how Kentik offers a lot of Preset Dashboards and Saved views ? (by the way, always peruse our library, a lot of the presets here have been built for our own needs, chances are every time you want to create a Dashboard or a Saved View, one of our Network Nerds over at Kentik has already produced something similar for you to use or steal inspiration from)

In this special case, the Library Label Filtering capability allows users to expand and contract two categories of labels: Kentik Presets and Your Own Company Labels, as displayed in the example below.

Hope you find this feature useful!

We are excited to announce the early access release of Traffic Costs, Kentik’s newest automated workflow that illuminates the cost of key slices of network traffic. This release is the latest extension of our platform’s network cost intelligence capabilities, enabling users to optimize network spend and maximize profitability. 

Read on to learn more! 

The network cost challenge

Traditionally, network cost analysis has been a complex, time-consuming, and often imprecise process — one that relies on manual analysis, disparate data sources, and cumbersome spreadsheets that drain valuable engineering resources. Yet for service providers and digital enterprises alike, this type of analysis is critical for improving both cost and operational efficiencies.

Therefore, it came as no surprise that one of the most frequently requested enhancements from our customers was for Kentik to tackle this industry-wide challenge with network cost intelligence capabilities.

We began addressing this need with the launch of Connectivity Costs — a powerful workflow that allows users to input their bandwidth contracts and associated interfaces with edge providers to model monthly network spend across upstream connections. More recently, we added backbone cost support to the workflow, giving customers a centralized view of total spend and Cost per Mbps across edge and backbone providers, sites, markets, and more. 

Connectivity Costs has quickly become one of our most successful and widely-used workflows. It also provides incredibly valuable data — giving visibility into the cost structure of any traffic flowing through the interfaces it tracks.

Naturally, the next step (and one our customers were most eager for) was to take this workflow to the next level and develop the ability to quantify the cost of any slice of traffic on the network. And that’s where things got really interesting...

Flow–based Traffic Costs

The reason it’s so difficult for network teams to quickly assess the cost of traffic slices comes down to the complexity of how traffic is measured and billed:

• Traffic is priced monthly using p9x calculations based on 5-minute SNMP samples.
• Traffic often traverses multiple interfaces, and the only way to understand where it went is through flow data.
• However, flow data is sampled and not precise enough for billing, while SNMP provides accurate volume but only at the interface level—not by traffic slice.

In other words: SNMP tells you how much traffic went through an interface, and flow tells you what traffic went through—but neither on its own gives you cost clarity at a granular level. And it gets more complicated – each edge interface is tied to a provider contract with a specific price (e.g., $/Mbps); but, those interfaces carry traffic from many sources—multiple OTTs, ASNs, applications, and customers—all at once. At the same time, a single ASN’s traffic may span multiple interfaces, each with its own cost structure.

This fragmented view makes it nearly impossible to get accurate cost insights without heavy manual analysis. As a result, vital cost data stays buried—forcing network teams to rely on spreadsheets, approximations, and best guesses.

Kentik’s Traffic Costs solves this problem at scale. It automates the entire process, combining flow with the SNMP and contract data from Connectivity Costs, to give you precise, per-traffic-slice cost analysis in just a few clicks.

How to access and use Traffic Costs

Kentik Traffic Costs combines the cost structure and traffic volumes of each interface with your contextually enriched flow data – drawing a complete picture of how traffic moves in and out of your entire network, isolating those traffic slices with precision, and then calculating aggregate costs for those traffic slices to and from specific networks. 

All Kentik customer accounts now have access to Traffic Costs. Users will see a new page selection under our platform’s Edge menu for Traffic Costs: 

From the main Traffic Costs page, users have the option to generate cost estimates for a particular Source/Destination ASN, ASN Group, or AS Path, or Customer Port, either selecting an entry from the dropdown or entering one to search.

An estimate on a particular AS Group, for example, shows the aggregated cost of all the flow-sampled traffic, no matter where it enters or exits your network.

Below the sankey chart for each estimate, you can see costs broken down by each path contributing to the total traffic slice cost. You can easily see which device and interface the traffic flowed through, the associated cost group, connectivity type and provider, as well as the cost/mpbs for ingress and egress traffic volumes. Our model takes into account the billing direction for your traffic profile, only calculating costs for traffic in the direction of your billing. 

Monthly tracking with snapshots

Since flow data is resource intensive and only retained for a finite period of time after ingest, Kentik offers a “Snapshot” feature to save Traffic Cost views. At the top of every query/estimate result is the option to save as a snapshot, so users can retain important cost views for tracking and sharing.

Users can also set up automated monthly snapshots to retain a longer-term view of their costs, where it’s important to have insights over time. 

All saved snapshots are available near the bottom of the Traffic Costs landing page, broken out by traffic cost slice. Additionally, users can see their entire Monthly Snapshot History for all traffic slices on the Traffic Costs landing page, making it easy to quickly identify month-over-month trend lines for various traffic slices. 

Top Use Cases & Benefits

We believe the use cases for Traffic Costs are incredibly powerful. Here are a few that stand out:

• Identify high-cost paths: Instantly surface routes and interconnects driving the most spend – helping you to develop action plans to optimize traffic engineering and interconnect agreements to reduce costs over time.
• Optimize content delivery costs: Cloud, content, and CDN providers can measure the cost per Mbps to deliver traffic to a specific destination network, enabling data-backed decisions around content delivery strategies and cost optimization.
• Improve profit margins: Tier 2 IP transit providers and managed service providers (MSPs) can instantly calculate how much a downstream customer’s traffic is costing them in upstream costs, and compare it against that customer's revenue—supporting more profitable pricing strategies and stronger negotiating positions during renewals.
• Eliminate manual toil: Replace hours of spreadsheet wrangling and data stitching with automated traffic cost insights – freeing engineering teams to focus on higher-impact work. 
• Track cost trends over time: With monthly cost tracking, measure the financial impact of peering optimizations or routing changes – and share progress across teams. 
• Democratize cost insights: Make network cost data accessible across the business – from finance to sales to leadership – to enable more accurate transit pricing, better contract negotiations, and data-backed decision making. 

See Traffic Costs in action

Watch this short demo video to see a quick walkthrough of Traffic Costs: 

Watch Demo Video

And that’s just the beginning!

This first iteration of Traffic Costs provides traffic dimensional slicing by Source/Destination ASNs and Customer Ports, but there’s much more to come! Here’s what we’re working towards on the horizon: 

• More granular traffic slicing. Calculate costs by specific CDNs, OTT services and providers, geographic regions or markets, and even by groups of internal or external IPs.
• Dynamic “what-if” pricing analysis. Model cost scenarios on the fly—like estimating the impact of a $0.05/Mbps price drop from a transit provider on total spend toward a specific network.
• Proactive budget tracking and forecasting. Stay ahead of spend with current-year budget monitoring, alerting, and predictive forecasting to keep you aligned with financial targets.

What else would you like to see in our Traffic Costs workflow? Let us know your experience and thoughts – we’d love to hear your feedback! 

For more information about Traffic Costs, check out the Kentik Knowledge Base. If you have questions, would like to see a demo, or would like hands on help to better understand Traffic Costs in your environment, contact your Kentik account team.