As cloud network engineers work towards optimizing their cloud infrastructures for costs, performance, and security, they need to be able to quickly and easily investigate traffic across various public cloud regions and availability zones in GCP, AWS, and Azure. 

This detailed traffic path between cloud components is central to Kentik's Cloud offering; however, up until now, filtering for this traffic in Data Explorer required users to manually list all of the Zone to Zone options – which was inconvenient at best. So we fixed that. Read on.

Introducing a new type of filter clauses

The magic here lies in this new filter, now available for a certain list of hybrid cloud related Data Explorer dimensions: 

Source != (or ==) Destination

Here is how these look in Data Explorer now:

...using these two filter operators from the above screenshot now allow our users to filter traffic that either goes across zones (Does not equal the value of) or stays within a zone (Equals the value of) 

What dimensions is this available for?

While we were at it, we identified several other dimensions that could benefit from these new operators. Here's the list:

Beyond the hybrid cloud use-cases mentioned above, these new operators are also quite useful to look at inter-site traffic based on source or destination IP addresses as defined in the Site attributes.

Important note on Alerting
At the moment, these comparators are not available in our traffic-based alerting system.

Take these for a spin and let us know what you think!