Network Traffic Analysis

Network traffic analysis provides the ability to characterize IP traffic — understanding how and where network traffic flows — which is critical for assuring network availability, performance, and security. Network traffic analysis provides visibility into your network using tools to perform monitoring, troubleshooting and in-depth inspection, and interpretation with the synthesis of traffic flow data.

It helps network operators to determine where to apply Quality of Service (QoS) policies as well as how to optimize resource usage, and it plays a vital role in network security to detect distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other undesirable network events and activity.

Before Kentik, network visibility monitoring had been dominated by single or multi-tier appliance architectures. But as network data volumes grew exponentially, the inadequacy of these legacy approaches to provide network-wide visibility became obvious. Kentik uses a big data engine running on a scale-out, back-end cluster infrastructure, and is designed for SaaS consumption via Kentik’s web portal and APIs. By leveraging cloud efficiencies, Kentik delivers visibility across your entire network with data and analytics at a scale, speed and affordability that can’t be matched by previous designs.

Analyzing flow traffic data in near real-time provides live network intelligence to facilitate capacity planning, ensuring that network resources are used appropriately in support of organizational goals. Flow protocols such as NetFlow provide key network intelligence for sophisticated analysis to optimize strategic network planning — for example, who to peer with, backbone upgrade planning, and routing policy planning. This network analysis also makes tactical network engineering decisions happen much faster, like adding additional network hardware or upgrading link capacity. This all results in minimizing the total cost of network operations while maximizing network performance, capacity, security, and reliability.

Kentik lets you dive deep into traffic flow details from any timeframe in the previous 90 days by collecting actual raw flow data in its private cloud, rather than relying on summaries. You can focus on an individual device or any combination of devices. You can zero in on any of more than 20 metrics like packets per second, bits per second, unique IP addresses, and more via categories such as ASN, geo, port, IP, interface, VLAN, and MAC address.

Kentik also enables deep dive analysis using detailed flow data that can determine whether a traffic anomaly is in fact a DDoS attack. With Kentik’s powerful ability to drill-down on actual flow details, you won’t be relying on guesswork to address network performance issues or security threats.

Kentik’s easy-to-use, SaaS solution is purpose-built to deliver real-time network traffic intelligence. Kentik’s approach to network traffic visibility provides detailed information at scale, with super-fast query response. Modern traffic analysis features include anomaly detection, an open, API-based architecture, and a user interface built by-and-for network operators.

Kentik’s public cloud ingests and stores hundreds of billions of flow records in an average day, making all of the incoming flow data queryable within three seconds of receipt. Instead of pivoting between several incompatible network monitoring tools to troubleshoot a network issue, network operation and security teams can now quickly detect and address a huge range of network-related issues from a single SaaS network visibility service.