Kentik Blog

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.

Digital transformation is underway. If you don’t believe it, read this week’s WSJ recap of a panel on the topic. You should also check out the earnings reports released this week by the big-three public cloud providers, who all saw spikes. Lastly, watch to Pandora talk about how the music-streaming company is getting better network performance for better customer experience. All that and more after the jump…

NPM appliances and difficult-to-scale enterprise software deployments were appropriate technology for their day. But 15 years later, we’re well into the era of the cloud, and legacy NPM approaches are far from the best available option. In this post we look at why it’s high time to sunset the horse-and-buggy NPM systems of yesteryear and instead take advantage of SaaS network traffic intelligence powered by big data.

Today we’re launching a weekly blog series called “News in Networking.” Tune in each week for a quick roundup of industry news that seems noteworthy to the Kentik team. This week’s highlights include a look at hot topics at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Spring 2017 conference, an article on bufferbloat (yes, it’s real) and the causes behind a slow internet, a list of IoT-enabled DDoS attacks that underscore security risks, and more…

Most of the testing and discussion of flow protocols over the years has been based on enterprise use cases and fairly low-bandwidth assumptions. In this post we take a fresh look, focusing instead on the real-world traffic volumes handled by operators of large-scale networks. How do NetFlow and other variants of stateful flow tracking compare with packet sampling approaches like sFlow? Read on…

Join Kentik at one of our events next week in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York City. Kentik will be sponsoring and participating in the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Spring 2017 conference April 25-26 in SF. We’ll also be participating as a member in the 2017 Internet2 Global Summit April 24-26 in Washington DC. Meanwhile on April 26 we’re hosting a reception in NYC featuring presentations including one from our customer MediaMath. Hope to see you soon!

It’s very costly to operate a large-scale Internet edge, making lower-end edge routers a subject of keen interest for service providers and Web enterprises alike. Such routers are comparatively short on FIB capacity, but depending on the routes needed to serve your customers that might not be an issue. How can you find out for sure? In this post, Alex Henthorn-Iwane, VP Product Marketing, explains how a new feature in Kentik Detect can show you the answer.