With February 2021 comes another heavy load of new Synthetic Monitoring feature additions: Synthetics Dashboard Widgets, more functionality for Mesh tests, we're now surfacing related Network Flow data within Synthetic test results, as well as many more general point improvements. See for yourself.

Dashboard Widgets and My Kentik Portal Support

Kentik customers now have the option of adding synthetics test results as widgets to their Kentik dashboards and then sharing those widgets with their customers (tenants) via My Kentik Portal. Custom dashboards also let you visualize real traffic charts alongside synthetic test results to help you easily correlate test failures with changes in real traffic patterns.

• Editing any existing dashboard will show users an option to add “Synthetic Test View.”
• Clicking Add will show a modal that allows users to select a synthetic test from the list of tests configured in the account.
• If the selected test happens to be a mesh test, the user has the option of choosing to have the widget either show a mesh or a table of results.

High Density Meshes and Mesh Improvements

The mesh tests are a very popular feature and we continue to respond to the most common UX enhancement requests. We’ve made the following improvements:

• For very large meshes, we’ve added dynamic horizontal and vertical scrollbars when the mesh gets beyond a certain size.
• For “Network Performance Meshes” shown in the Synthetics Performance Dashboard, a label has been added to clearly indicate the 15-minute range. Clicking the link propagates the 15-minute time range so that the test results page shows the same results as the performance dashboard.
• The “Customize” button has been renamed to “Show/Hide” for clarity
• We increased the string length for labels on the left and top edges of the meshes that represented sites to allow the strings to be longer and wrap across multiple lines so as to let users determine which paths/routes are failing with a quick glance of the mesh.
• Hovering over the individual cells of a mesh would show location information as city, state, country, which is not easily actionable when testing between public cloud regions or private sites. This is now enhanced with both pieces of information.

• The Cloud Performance preset meshes are well-received. We improved the UX around parsing their information as well as customization:
  • We added the ability to easily clone them (like the SaaS applications), which allows customers to customize them to make a "yybrid-cloud" mesh out of it for their own specific network performance needs.
  • We also show cloud regions in addition to geo (city/state) information in the labels to the left and the top.

Flow Data in Mesh Test Results

Showing real traffic time-series charts alongside synthetics metrics in the test details is an important feature, but this wasn’t possible to do for site-to-site tests (like agent-to-agent tests or mesh tests) because there was no IP to query based on. We solved this by leveraging the new site-IP configuration that was added to the device configuration. If a site-IP is present it will be used to build the traffic chart and allow the user to jump into Data Explorer to slice and dice the data further.

General Improvements

Several general improvements to the UX have been made in response to customer feedback:

• The workflow to find a failing sub-test’s details (the time-series charts) is simplified by making the agent dots on the map clickable. Clicking them now takes you to the test details:

• Defining and assigning a notification channel in the test creation screen is much more intuitive than it was before:

• It wasn’t clear to users that it takes a while (up to a day) for IP changes to reflect. We added a tooltip for this:

• The point where the day changed on the test timeline was not clear — this is improved visually. Also, the date format shown in the selector now matches the format of the date shown on the timeline:

• The agent version for customer’s private agents is now visible to them. Also, checking a customer’s private agents’ IPs and versions is simplified — the agents’ information is readily available in the table:

• Paused tests now show in historical data.
• Test results legend previously said “ICMP could be blocked.” This has been generalized, as the test could be TCP or UDP.