Blog Highlights

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.

In part 2 of the network observability series, we tackle the first key to the input needed for network observability — from what networks and network elements we gather telemetry data.

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.

BGP is the protocol used to route traffic across the interconnected Autonomous Systems (AS) that make up the Internet, making effective BGP configuration an important part of controlling your network’s destiny. In this post we build on the basics covered in Part 1, covering additional concepts, looking at when the use of BGP is called for, and digging deeper into how BGP can help — or, if misconfigured, hinder — the efficient delivery of traffic to its destination.

In this post we continue our look at BGP — the protocol used to route traffic across the interconnected Autonomous Systems (AS) that make up the Internet — by clarifying the difference between eBGP and iBGP and then starting to dig into the basics of actual BGP configuration. We’ll see how to establish peering connections with neighbors and to return a list of current sessions with useful information about each.

BGP used to be primarily of interest only to ISPs and hosting providers, but it’s become something with which all network engineers should get familiar. In this conclusion to our four-part BGP tutorial series, we fill in a few more pieces of the puzzle, including when — and when not — it makes sense to advertise your routes to a service provider using BGP.

Streaming telemetry aims to modernize the collection of network and device metrics to keep up with the scale of next-generation networks, and provide new ways to access the huge variety of metrics that network devices can now generate. Kentik’s Aaron Kagawa and Crystal Li review the current state of streaming telemetry and its surrounding ecosystem, discuss Kentik’s take on the value that streaming telemetry brings to network analytics, and outline our approach to powering-up network teams by leveraging streaming telemetry.

NetFlow vs sFlow: Which is better? In many cases, the choice is not up to the user because most networking gear supports only one or the other. In this post we look at the difference between the two and how network operators can support all of the flow protocols that their networks generate.

If you are at the beginning of the journey to modernize your application and infrastructure architecture with Kubernetes, it’s important to understand how service-to-service communication works in this new world. In this blog post, we provide a starting point for understanding the networking model behind Kubernetes and how to make things simpler and more efficient.

To ensure network operation teams can take action on insights from capacity planning tools, there are several guidelines to follow. In this post, we look at the requirements needed for an effective capacity planning solution that ensures optimal network performance and visibility.

Disney+ launched with an impressive debut, especially considering that technical problems, potentially capacity issues, plagued the service shortly after launch. In this post, we look at Disney+ traffic peaks around launch. We also explain why, during high-profile launches like that of Disney+, broadband subscribers are likely to blame their provider for any perceived problems. Network operators must be able to understand the dynamics of new loads placed on the network by new services and plan accordingly.

Cloud providers take away the huge overhead of building, maintaining, and upgrading physical infrastructure. However, many system operators, including NetOps, SREs, and SecOps teams, are facing a huge visibility challenge. Here we talk about how VPC flow logs can help.