Network observability, now publicly shareable

What fun is network observability if you can’t share what you see? That’s why we’ve added public link sharing to the Kentik platform.

One of the greater missions of network observability is to break the boundaries of conventional monitoring. At Kentik, we focused our initial efforts on making complex infrastructure problems easy to visualize, understand and resolve. Now we’re tackling a follow-up mandate: to democratize network observability.

With public link sharing, you can share secured public links to visualizations of your Data Explorer and Synthetics workflow — with anyone you want. Just look for that familiar “Share” button to get started!

Public link sharing also comes with the bells and whistles, including:

• A public, secure website to display your visualizations
• The ability to customize your sharable link using human-readable URLs
• The ability for your public viewers to change visualization types or granularly, or select time-series being displayed — and even drill into the visualization at hand

Think about the possibilities unlocked by link sharing your visualizations. For example, the infrastructure team’s “Mean Time to Innocence” (you’ll want to call it MTTI) will greatly benefit from it.

Being able to share a specific slice of what you can see in Kentik will help foster collaboration and transparency and help break down silos with external vendors, the media, other internal parties, and even customers and prospects. That includes being able to:

• Efficiently instrument troubleshooting sessions internally and externally
• Show evidence of outages and performance issues to vendors
• Augment support responses to customers with actual, interactive evidence
• Build brand confidence by transparently communicating on outages and their impact
• Empower your product and marketing teams with tools to showcase the performance of your infrastructure

Beyond these use cases, we’re looking forward to seeing what other creative uses you’ll find for public link sharing. So, in the spirit of sharing, share the love, and tell us how you’re using it!

While testing this new feature, the team here at Kentik came up with a few creative ideas of our own for public link sharing. Here are a few for inspiration:

• Displaying a global latency/jitter/loss matrix to connectivity prospects
• Show your app team hard evidence that the network is not responsible for a degraded performance
• Help cache-embedding content providers troubleshoot performance issues on a specific OTT service
• Augment peering requests/responses with traffic graph and traffic localization
• Support discussions with peers around sudden traffic shifts

Our customers have been asking for this feature, but enabling the sharing of selected-Kentik views to those who don’t have access to the service isn’t trivial. We understand that certain data will always be confidential and shouldn’t be shared. That data has been removed from shared views.

Our journey to democratize network observability has just begun.

With this first feature set around public link sharing hitting your browsers, our minds are already full of ideas to take this further. And there’s already a long slate of iterations to come, so stay tuned.

To keep making Kentik your go-to network observability platform, we’d love to hear your feedback once you’ve kicked the tires. Or, as our product team always says, “The future of this feature set is mostly in your hands, so tell us what you’d like!”

More information on public link sharing is available in the Kentik Knowledge Base.

Need network observability that’s sharable? Reach out to our team for a demo or to start your trial.