Kentik Blog

Not long ago network flow data was a secondary source of data for IT departments trying to better understand their network status, traffic, and utilization. Today it’s become a leading focus of analysis, yielding valuable insights in areas including network security, network optimization, and business processes. In this post, senior analyst Shamus McGillicudy of EMA looks at the value and versatility of flow for network analytics.

Today’s increased reliance on cloud and distributed application architectures means that denial of just a single critical dependency can shut down Web availability and revenue. In this post we look at what that means for large, complex enterprises. Do legacy tools protect sufficiently against new and different vulnerabilities? If not, what constitutes a modern approach to DDoS protection, and why is it so crucial to business resilience?

After presenting at the recent CIOArena conference in Atlanta, Kentik VP of Strategic Alliances Jim Frey came away with a number of insights about the adoption of digital business operations in the enterprise. In his first in a series of related posts, Jim looks at audience survey responses indicating how reliant enterprises — even those that aren’t digital natives or located in tech industry hotspots — have become on the Internet for core elements of their business.

Kentik is pleased to announce our membership in the Internet2® consortium, which operates a nationwide research and education (R&E) network and establishes best practices for R&E networking. Because Internet2 is a major source of innovation, our participation will enable us to grow our connection to the higher education networking community, to learn from member perspectives, and to support the advancement of applications and services for R&E networks.

DDoS attacks constitute a very significant and growing portion of the overall cybersecurity threat. In this post we recap highlights of a recent Webinar jointly presented by Kentik’s VP of Product Marketing, Alex Henthorn-Iwane, and Forrester Senior Analyst Joseph Blankenship. The Webinar focused on three areas: attack trends, the state of defense techniques, and key recommendations that organizations can implement to improve their protective posture.

As the architecture of digital business applications transitions toward the cloud, network teams are increasingly involved in assuring application performance across distributed infrastructure. Filling this new role effectively requires a deeper toolset than provided by APM alone, with both internal and external network-level visibility. In this post from EMA’s Shamus McGillicudy, we look at how modern NPM solutions empower network managers to tackle these new challenges.

As IT technologies evolve toward greater reliance on the cloud, longstanding networking practitioners are adapting to a new environment. The changes are easier to implement in greenfield companies than in more established brownfield enterprises. In this third post of a three-part series, analyst Jim Metzler talks with Kentik’s Alex Henthorn-Iwane about how network management is impacted by the differences between the two situations.

The range, creativity, and skills of the Kentik engineering team were on full display at our recent on-site for local and remote engineers. Gathering to confer on coming product enhancements, the team also enjoyed San Francisco dining and tried recreational welding and blacksmithing. But the highlight was our first-ever hackathon, which yielded an array of smart ideas for extending the capabilities of the Kentik Detect platform.

Cisco’s late-January acquisition of AppDynamics confirms what was already evident from Kentik’s experience in 2016, which is that effective visibility is now recognized industry-wide as a critical requirement for success. AppDynamics provides APM, the full value of which can’t be realized without the modern NPM offered by Kentik Detect. In this post we look at how Kentik uniquely complements APM to provide a comprehensive visibility solution.

With end-of-life coming this summer for Peakflow 7.5, many Arbor Networks customers face another round of costly upgrades to older, soon-to-be-unsupported appliance hardware. In this post we look at how Arbor users pay coming and going to continue with appliance-based DDoS detection, and we consider whether that makes sense given the availability of a big data SaaS like Kentik Detect.