Blog Highlights

We’re bringing AI to network observability. And adding new products to Kentik, including a modern NMS, to simplify troubleshooting complex networks.

In this post, Doug Madory reviews the highlights of his wide-ranging internet analysis from the past year, which included covering the state of BGP (both routing leaks and progress in RPKI), submarine cables (both cuts and another historic activation), major outages, and how geopolitics has shaped the internet in 2023.

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.

Under the waves at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans are almost 1.5 million kilometers of submarine fiber optic cables. Going unnoticed by most everyone in the world, these cables underpin the entire global internet and our modern information age. In this post, Phil Gervasi explains the technology, politics, environmental impact, and economics of submarine telecommunications cables.

Last week a major internet outage took out one of Australia’s biggest telecoms. In a statement out yesterday, Optus blames the hours-long outage, which left millions of Aussies without telephone and internet, on a route leak from a sibling company. In this post, we discuss the outage and how it compares to the historic outage suffered by Canadian telecom Rogers in July 2022.

Artificial intelligence is certainly a hot topic right now, but what does it mean for the networking industry? In this post, Phil Gervasi looks at the role of AI and LLM in networking and separates the hype from the reality.

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.

Just after midnight on October 1, 2023, the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic began passing internet traffic over its long-awaited, first-ever submarine cable connection. In this blog post, we cover how Kentik’s measurements captured this historic activation, as well as the epic story of the advocacy work it took to make this development possible.

Let me tell you something you already know: Networks are more complex than ever. They are massive. They are confounding. Modern networks are obtuse superorganisms of switches, routers, containers, and overlays; a hodgepodge of telemetry from AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and sprawling infrastructure that spans more than a dozen timezones.

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.

Stretching back to the AS7007 leak of 1997, this comprehensive blog post covers the most notable and significant BGP incidents in the history of the internet, from traffic-disrupting BGP leaks to crypto-stealing BGP hijacks.

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.