Kentik Blog: Company

Backend Engineering Manager Aaron Kagawa shares how he finds wellness in surfing — with a little help from Kentik’s employee benefits.

In our employee spotlight series, we highlight members of the Kentik team, what they’re working on, and their most memorable moments within the company. In this Q&A, meet Solutions Engineer Akshay Dhawale.

VP of Engineering Mike Ho kicks off a blog series to talk about Kentik’s engineering team, where they’ve been, decisions they’ve made, problems solved, and fun facts about the team and the platform.

In our employee spotlight series, we highlight members of the Kentik team, what they’re working on, and their most memorable moments within the company. In this Q&A, meet Steven Reynolds, a Kentik UI engineer.

Today we expand our partnership with New Relic. Together, we’re deepening New Relic’s full-stack observability into the network layer and giving IT operations, SREs and development teams shared context to resolve issues quickly.

The most complex point of today’s networks is the edge, where there are more protocols, diverse traffic, and security exposure. The network edge is also a place where Kentik provides high value. In this post, we discuss how to implement Kentik in your data center.

During Networking Field Day 19, Kentik presented on new capabilities for service providers, cloud and cloud-native environments, and gave a technical talk on tagging and data enrichment. In this post, we recap the event highlights and provide the videos for watching and sharing.

Kentik is growing! Today we marked our permanent landing in Europe. Kentik’s SaaS solution has already been embraced by dozens of organizations across the European continent — and our new presence will support even more organizations who deliver or depend on routed networks and the Internet as an essential part of their operations and business.

If you’ve spent any amount of time with Kentik Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman, you know he’s a networking nerd at heart. You may have also heard of his past (and sometimes current pastime) as a high-stakes poker player. Now, in merging two of Avi’s passions together, we’ve launched Kentik Poker!

We’re very excited to share that KDDI, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, has selected the Kentik platform for network planning, operations, and to protect their key network assets and services. Read about the reasons that KDDI chose Kentik and why we’re so excited about this announcement.

Join Kentik at one of our events next week in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York City. Kentik will be sponsoring and participating in the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Spring 2017 conference April 25-26 in SF. We’ll also be participating as a member in the 2017 Internet2 Global Summit April 24-26 in Washington DC. Meanwhile on April 26 we’re hosting a reception in NYC featuring presentations including one from our customer MediaMath. Hope to see you soon!

Kentik is pleased to announce our membership in the Internet2® consortium, which operates a nationwide research and education (R&E) network and establishes best practices for R&E networking. Because Internet2 is a major source of innovation, our participation will enable us to grow our connection to the higher education networking community, to learn from member perspectives, and to support the advancement of applications and services for R&E networks.

The range, creativity, and skills of the Kentik engineering team were on full display at our recent on-site for local and remote engineers. Gathering to confer on coming product enhancements, the team also enjoyed San Francisco dining and tried recreational welding and blacksmithing. But the highlight was our first-ever hackathon, which yielded an array of smart ideas for extending the capabilities of the Kentik Detect platform.

Cisco’s late-January acquisition of AppDynamics confirms what was already evident from Kentik’s experience in 2016, which is that effective visibility is now recognized industry-wide as a critical requirement for success. AppDynamics provides APM, the full value of which can’t be realized without the modern NPM offered by Kentik Detect. In this post we look at how Kentik uniquely complements APM to provide a comprehensive visibility solution.

While Kentik Detect’s ground-breaking DDoS detection is field-proven to catch 30% more attacks than legacy systems, our DDoS capabilities aren’t limited to standalone detection. We’re also actively working with leading mitigation providers to create end-to-end DDoS protection solutions. So we’re excited to be partnering with A10 Networks, whose products help defend some of the largest networks in the world, to enable seamless integration of Kentik Detect with A10 Thunder TPS mitigation.

Kentik is honored to be the sole network monitoring provider named by Forrester Research as a “Breakout Vendor” in a December 2016 report on the Virtual Network Infrastructure (VNI) space. The report asserts that I&O leaders can dramatically improve customer experience by choosing cloud networking solutions, and cites Kentik Detect as one of four groundbreaking products that are poised to supercede typical networking incumbents.

Avi Freedman recently spoke with Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro of PacketPushers about Kentik’s latest updates, which focus primarily on features that enhance network performance monitoring and DDoS protection. This post includes excerpts from that conversation as well as a link to the full podcast. Avi discusses his vision of appliance-free network monitoring, explains how host monitoring expands Kentik’s functionality, and gives an overview of how we detect and respond to anomalies and attacks.

Kentik’s recent recognition as an IDC Innovator for Cloud-Based Network Monitoring was based not only on our orientation as a cloud-based SaaS but also on the deep capabilities of Kentik Detect. In this post we look at how our purpose-built distributed architecture enables us to keep up with raw network traffic data while providing a unified network intelligence solution, including traffic analysis, performance monitoring, Internet peering, and DDoS protection.

In our second post related to BrightTalk videos recorded with Kentik at Cisco Live 2016, Kentik CEO Avi Freedman talks about the increasing threats that digital businesses face from DDoS and other forms of attacks and service interruptions. Avi also discusses the attributes that are required or desirable in a network visibility solution in order to effectively protect a network.

Cisco Live 2016 gave us a chance to meet with BrightTalk for some video-recorded discussions on hot topics in network operations. This post focuses on the first of those videos, in which Kentik’s Jim Frey, VP Strategic Alliances, talks about the complexity of today’s networks and how Big Data NetFlow analysis helps operators achieve timely insight into their traffic.

It was a blast taking part in our first ever Networking Field Day (NFD12), presenting our advanced and powerful network traffic analysis solution. Being at NFD12 gave us the opportunity to get valuable response and feedback from a set of knowledgeable network nerd and blogger delegates. See what they had to say about Kentik Detect…

Cisco’s announcement of Tetration Analytics means that IT and network leaders can no longer ignore the need for Big Data intelligence. In this post, Kentik CEO Avi Freedman explains how that’s good for Kentik, which has been pushing hard for this particular industry transition. Cisco’s appliance-based approach is distinct from the SaaS option that most customers choose for Kentik Detect, but Tetration’s focus on Big Data analytics provides important validation that Kentik is on the right track.

By mapping customer traffic merged with topology and BGP data, Kentik Detect now provides a way to visualize traffic flow across across your network, through the Internet, and to a destination. This new Peering Analytics feature will primarily be used to determine who to peer (interconnect) with. But as you’ll see, Peering Analytics has use cases far beyond peering.

Taken together, three additional attributes of Kentik Detect — self-service, API-enabled, and multi-tenant — further enhance the fundamental advantages of Kentik’s cloud-based big data approach to network visibility.