Kentik Blog

As cloud computing continues to gain ground, there’s a natural tension in IT between cloud advocates and those who prefer the status quo of in-house networking. In part two of his three-part series on this “culture war,” analyst Jim Metzler clarifies what is — and is not — involved in the transition to the cloud, and how the adoption of cloud computing impacts the way that network organizations should think about the management tools they use.

While Kentik Detect’s ground-breaking DDoS detection is field-proven to catch 30% more attacks than legacy systems, our DDoS capabilities aren’t limited to standalone detection. We’re also actively working with leading mitigation providers to create end-to-end DDoS protection solutions. So we’re excited to be partnering with A10 Networks, whose products help defend some of the largest networks in the world, to enable seamless integration of Kentik Detect with A10 Thunder TPS mitigation.

Unless you’re a Tier 1 provider, IP transit is a significant cost of providing Internet service or operating a digital business. To minimize the pain, your network monitoring tools would ideally show you historical route utilization and notify you before the traffic volume on any path triggers added fees. In this post we look at how Kentik Detect is able to do just that, and we show how our Data Explorer is used to drill down on the details of route utilization.

Kentik is honored to be the sole network monitoring provider named by Forrester Research as a “Breakout Vendor” in a December 2016 report on the Virtual Network Infrastructure (VNI) space. The report asserts that I&O leaders can dramatically improve customer experience by choosing cloud networking solutions, and cites Kentik Detect as one of four groundbreaking products that are poised to supercede typical networking incumbents.

Earlier this year the folks over at RouterFreak did a very thorough review of Kentik Detect. We really respected their thoroughness and the fact that they are practicing network engineers, so as we’ve come up with cool new gizmos in our product, we’ve asked them to extend their review. This post highlights some excerpts from their latest review, with particular focus on Kentik NPM, our enhanced network performance monitoring solution.

Avi Freedman recently spoke with Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro of PacketPushers about Kentik’s latest updates, which focus primarily on features that enhance network performance monitoring and DDoS protection. This post includes excerpts from that conversation as well as a link to the full podcast. Avi discusses his vision of appliance-free network monitoring, explains how host monitoring expands Kentik’s functionality, and gives an overview of how we detect and respond to anomalies and attacks.

Kentik’s recent recognition as an IDC Innovator for Cloud-Based Network Monitoring was based not only on our orientation as a cloud-based SaaS but also on the deep capabilities of Kentik Detect. In this post we look at how our purpose-built distributed architecture enables us to keep up with raw network traffic data while providing a unified network intelligence solution, including traffic analysis, performance monitoring, Internet peering, and DDoS protection.

Every so often a fundamental shift in technology sets off a culture war in the world of IT. Two decades ago, with the advent of a commercial Internet, it was a struggle between the Bellheads and the Netheads. Today, Netheads have become the establishment and cloud computing advocates are pushing to upend the status quo. In this first post of a 3-part series, analyst Jim Metzler looks at how this dynamic is playing out in IT organizations.

“NetFlow” may be the most common short-hand term for network flow data, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only important flow protocol. In fact there are three primary flavors of flow data — NetFlow, sFlow, and IPFIX — as well as a variety of brand-specific names used by various networking vendors. To help clear up any confusion, this post looks at the main flow-data protocols supported by Kentik Detect.

How does Kentik NPM help you track down network performance issues? In this post by Jim Meehan, Director of Solutions Engineering, we look at how we recently used our own NPM solution to determine if a spike in retransmits was due to network issues or a software update we’d made on our application servers. You’ll see how we ruled out the software update, and were then able to narrow the source of the issue to a specific route using BGP AS Path.