Kentik Blog: Data Center Networking

Kentik transforms real-time network telemetry into actionable alerts for AI-optimized data centers. By converting database queries into custom alerts, engineers can detect issues like elephant flows, idle links, and packet loss before performance suffers and triggers alerts in systems like ServiceNow or PagerDuty.

Elephant flows are no longer rare. They’re foundational to AI workloads. In today’s GPU-heavy data centers, long-lived, high-volume flows can distort ECMP, overflow buffers, and rack up unexpected cloud bills. Kentik helps you see and tame these elephants with real-time flow analytics, automated alerting, and predictive capacity planning.

In leaf-spine data center networks, traffic often becomes imbalanced, leaving some uplinks idle and resulting in wasted bandwidth. Kentik helps engineers identify underutilized paths, diagnose the causes, and take corrective action using enriched telemetry, visual topology maps, and intelligent alerts, turning hidden inefficiencies into actionable insights.

Traditional data center networking can’t meet the needs of today’s AI workload communication. We need a different networking paradigm to meet these new challenges. In this blog post, learn about the technical changes happening in data center networking from the silicon to the hardware to the cables in between.