Blog Highlights

In the early hours of Wednesday, January 25, Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud, suffered a major outage that disrupted their cloud-based services and popular applications such as Sharepoint, Teams, and Office 365. In this post, we’ll highlight some of what we saw using Kentik’s unique capabilities, including some surprising aftereffects of the outage that continue to this day.

This week marks a decade since the ALBA-1 submarine cable began carrying traffic between Cuba and the global internet. And last month’s recommendation by the US Department of Justice to deny the request by the ARCOS cable system to connect Cuba shows that, almost a decade later, geopolitics continues to shape the physical internet — especially when it comes to Cuba.

A cornerstone of network observability is the ability to ask any question of your network. In this post, we’ll look at the Kentik Data Explorer, the interface between an engineer and the vast database of telemetry within the Kentik platform. With the Data Explorer, an engineer can very quickly parse and filter the database in any manner and get back the results in almost any form.

This past year was another busy one for the internet. This year-end blog post highlights some of the top pieces of analysis that we published in the past 12 months. This analysis employs Kentik’s data, technology, and expertise to inform the industry and the public about issues involving the technical underpinnings of the global internet and how global events can impact connectivity.

On July 8, 2022, Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers Communications suffered a catastrophic outage taking down nearly all services for its 11 million customers in the largest internet outage in Canadian history. We dig into the outage and debunk the notion that it was caused by the withdrawal of BGP routes.

In this blog series, we dive deep into the peering coordinator workflow and show how the right tools can help you be successful in your role. In part 1, we discuss the economics of connectivity.

We’re excited to announce our beta launch of Kentik Kube, an industry-first solution that reveals how K8s traffic routes through an organization’s data center, cloud, and the internet.

On August 17, 2022, an attacker was able to steal $235,000 in cryptocurrency by employing a BGP hijack against Celer Bridge, a cryptocurrency service. While this incident is the latest such attack, there are lessons beyond the world of cryptocurrency for any organization that conducts business on the internet.

The goal of network observability is to answer any question about your network infrastructure and to have support from your observability stack to get those answers quickly, flexibly, proactively, and interactively. In this post, Kentik CEO Avi Freedman gives his thoughts on the past, present, and future of network observability.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a policy-based routing protocol that has long been an established part of the Internet infrastructure. Understanding BGP helps explain Internet interconnectivity and is key to controlling your own destiny on the Internet. With this post we kick off an occasional series explaining who can benefit from using BGP, how it’s used, and the ins and outs of BGP configuration.

The basics of network troubleshooting have not changed much over the years. When you’re network troubleshooting, a lot can be required to solve the problem. You could be solving many different issues across several different systems on your complex, hybrid network infrastructure. A network observability solution can help speed up and simplify the process.

In this post we look at the difference between NetFlow and sFlow and how network operators can support all of the flow protocols that their networks generate.