Our Connectivity Cost workflow is enhanced and now available!

We are excited to announce both a complete redesign and enhancements for our Connectivity Cost workflow. The new and advanced capabilities make managing and optimizing connectivity costs a cinch. All tedious work done manually to calculate connectivity cost extracting and munging data points from different silos into endless spreadsheets is now gone. You are most welcome.

You can now routinely and timely answer analytical interconnection decision-making questions, such as:

• How does our overall transit cost compare to our peering costs?
• Is it worth it to pay for this specific local provider vs. the current transit upstream?
• Cost-wise, how do these two transit providers compare? Should one be canceled? Or added?
• How have my costs evolved for this provider over the past X months?

Be ready to negotiate and optimize connectivity cost at any time with Kentik’s Connectivity Cost workflow.

What Makes Connectivity Cost Different?

Our Connectivity Cost workflow enables efficient management and planning of connectivity spending per Mbps across connectivity type, provider, and point of presence (POP)/sites. Kentik customers can now effortlessly observe cost evolution, in any currency, against strategic goals, and act timely to implement more cost-efficient connectivity agreements.

See the newly enhanced capabilities in the following sections.

Manage Connectivity Cost from Provider, Connectivity Type, and Site Perspectives

Get provider costs broken down by provider, connectivity type, or sites to track and optimize your cost per Mbps. Efficiently consolidate invoices and instrument contract negotiations with an understanding of current and historical data.

The below screengrab illustrates Kentik’s Connectivity Cost workflow providing total monthly spend and cost per Mbps benchmark metrics.

Automate Cost Calculation

Get provider costs applied to your network traffic volume automatically and monitor your monthly spending.

With the enhancements in our Connectivity Cost workflow, contract pricing data (typically kept in forms in the legal department and used in manual cost analysis) is now part of a streamlined process that automatically applies pricing to the interface traffic for cost calculations. All popular computation methods, including flat, committed, with or without tiers, and configurable percentile, are supported out-of-the-box. We understand that pricing agreements can have unique conditions that are hardwired in generic formulas, so the enhanced workflow also offers flexibility to accommodate custom pricing items, as “additional charges,” at contract or interface level (handy for cross-connect costs).

In Kentik style, calculations complexities are handled behind the scenes and your own unique cost items are accommodated as well. It is the end of time-consuming toil and out-of-band adjustments; all is done in one automated workflow.

See the image below:

Handle Global Connectivity and Currencies Fluctuations

The Connectivity Cost workflow also supports cost models of local contracts in different currencies and the dynamics of exchange rates. Bandwidth procured in bulk is sensitive to exchange-rate variations, adding another layer of complexity to cost tracking. Kentik makes it completely transparent by embedding exchange rate into daily calculations, ensuring that cost estimates for the ongoing month, as well as cost history for the past months, will always:

• Allow financial planning to consolidate all cost metrics in a single currency, and
• Keep both current month estimates and historical data truthful to the exchange rates when they are computed.

As shown below, Kentik’s Connectivity Costs workflow now natively addresses multi-currencies:

Optimize Connectivity Cost and Cross-functional Work

Connectivity costs are metrics consumed by teams other than network operations and data is rarely easy to ingest and parse for the non-technical crowd (whether the underlying cost models or the actual metrics).

With our workflow, multiple audiences and teams can now easily track and optimize your cost per Mbps, consolidate invoices, and instrument contract negotiations. Provider costs are automatically applied to network traffic volume and visualized in intuitive dashboards broken down by provider, connectivity type, or sites.

The Future of Connectivity Cost Management is Bright

Let’s say your teams are now reaping the benefits of the Connectivity Costs workflows. Connectivity costs are reviewed regularly, with goals set and tracked.

Think about this: These interconnection cost models are now available to the rest of Kentik workflows. The future is quite bright. All the necessary ingredients are now in place to be able to compute the cost of any slice of traffic coming in or out of your network: It can be different services that you run or offer; it can be other classes of users or customers that you identify with your Custom Dimensions logic; or even any CDN, OTT traffic, etc.

Be sure to check out our Connectivity Cost workflow and see how easy it is to stay on top of connectivity spending and capitalize on optimization opportunities.