Kentik Blog: Peering Analytics

Last month at DENOG11 in Germany, Kentik Site Reliability Engineer Costas Drogos talked about the SRE team’s journey during the last four years of growing Kentik’s infrastructure to support thousands of BGP sessions with customer devices on Kentik’s multi-tenant SaaS (cloud) platform.

Learn how enterprise video communications leader, Zoom, uses Kentik for network visibility, performance, peering analytics and improved customer support. Zoom’s Alex Guerrero, senior manager of SaaS operations, and Mike Leis, senior network engineer, share how they use Kentik to help Zoom deliver “frictionless meetings.”

Without package tracking, FedEx wouldn’t know how directly a package got to its destination or how to improve service and efficiency. 25 years into the commercial Internet, most service providers find themselves in just that situation, with no easy way to tell where an individual customer’s traffic exited the network. With Kentik Detect’s new Ultimate Exit feature, those days are over. Learn how Kentik’s per-customer traffic breakdown gives providers a competitive edge.

Traffic can get from anywhere to anywhere on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean all networks are directly connected. Instead, each network operator chooses the networks with which to connect. Both business and technical considerations are involved, and the ability to identify prime candidates for peering or transit offers significant competitive advantages. In this post we look at the benefits of intelligent interconnects and how networks can find the best peers to connect with.

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.