Kentik Launches Traffic Costs, Delivering Revenue-Boosting Insights with Real-Time Network Cost Intelligence

Traffic Costs is an industry-first automated workflow that instantly calculates flow-based cost estimates for key slices of network traffic, from CDNs and OTT services down to geographic regions and specific customers.

San Francisco, CA — September 3, 2025 — Kentik, the network intelligence platform, today launches Traffic Costs, an industry-first automated workflow delivering instant cost estimates for granular network traffic slices. Traffic Costs provides network, financial, and sales teams with insights to optimize spend, improve margins, and drive revenue.

“For service providers in particular, optimizing network spend is essential to maintaining healthy margins between traffic delivery costs and revenue, directly impacting profitability and competitive positioning,” said Jezzibell Gilmore, VP and GM of service providers at Kentik. “Providers want clear visibility into how each customer’s traffic impacts their top and bottom lines – understanding traffic routes, costs to deliver, and more, gives providers the insights they need to reach greater profitability.”

Traditionally, obtaining accurate insights into network connectivity and traffic costs has been a significant challenge for infrastructure teams for a number of reasons:

• Complex cost structures – Traffic flows across multiple interfaces, transit providers, transport links, IXs, and PNIs, each with its own contract terms and cost structure, making accurate cost allocation difficult.
• Manual, time-consuming analysis – Existing methods rely on multiple tools, spreadsheets, and fragmented data sources, requiring engineers and various cross-functional teams to collaborate, piecing together cost estimates manually.
• Data limitations – Traffic-based tracking provides granular visibility but lacks billing accuracy, while SNMP-based utilization captures total traffic but cannot isolate specific slices.

Accurately calculating the cost of just one slice of traffic requires a labor-intensive, multi-step process that consumes valuable engineering resource cycles. Large service providers and digital enterprise networks need to track costs across hundreds or even thousands of other networks to support engineering, commercial, and finance teams. The complexity and reliance on manual correlation make network cost analysis an ongoing burden, leading to missed optimization opportunities and unnecessary expenses. Additionally, the data is often siloed and inaccessible to the broader organization—leaving sales, finance, and product teams flying blind and unable to make fully informed decisions about pricing or customer profitability.

Traffic Costs is a powerful new industry-first workflow purpose-built to solve this long-standing problem at scale. By bringing together connectivity contract data, traffic flows, and SNMP utilization, Traffic Costs delivers instant flow-based cost estimates for key slices of traffic. With just a few clicks, operators can instantly see which slices of traffic are driving global connectivity spending – by customer, geographical market, ASN, CDN, OTT services, or even a specific set of IP addresses.

Network operators can use Kentik Traffic Costs to:

• Identify high-cost paths: Instantly surface routes and interconnects driving the most spend – and take action to optimize traffic engineering and interconnect agreements, to reduce costs over time.
• Improve profit margins: See exactly how much a customer’s traffic is costing you, and compare that against revenue to make smarter, more strategic decisions on deal pricing and renewal negotiations.
• Eliminate manual toil: Replace hours of spreadsheet wrangling and data stitching with automated traffic cost insights – freeing engineering teams to focus on higher-impact work.
• Track trends over time: With monthly cost tracking, measure the financial impact of peering optimizations or routing changes – and share progress across teams.
• Democratize cost insights: Make network cost data accessible across the business – from finance to sales to leadership – to enable more accurate services pricing, better contract negotiations, and data-backed decision making.
• More granular traffic slicing. Calculate costs by specific CDNs, OTT services, and providers, geographic regions or markets, all the way down to specific customers and IP addresses.

“Kentik Traffic Costs is like putting our connectivity spend under an X-ray,” said Tomás Lynch, Senior Network Architect at Vultr. “We now have instant visibility into which portions of our traffic are driving costs – and exactly where to optimize for performance and savings.”

About Kentik

Kentik is the network intelligence platform for modern infrastructure teams. Unlike traditional monitoring and observability tools, Kentik demystifies complex network operations, enabling organizations to deliver applications and innovation at scale. Built by network experts to make critical insight accessible to every engineer, Kentik is the real-time source of truth that understands every network in context — from data center to cloud to the internet. This single platform unifies and correlates cloud, device, flow, and synthetic data to turn telemetry into action. Market leaders like Akamai, Booking.com, Dropbox, and Zoom rely on Kentik to run, manage, and optimize their networks.