December 2021

To top off a strong 2021 the Kentik team delivered another batch of customer-driven features we know you’ll love! Here are the details for December 2021.

Kentik Synthetics

Ping and trace in page load tests

You are now able to run ping and traceroute on the App Agents. As a first step in the rollout, we have enabled UI changes to be able to run this as part of the Page Load test (the only test that uses the App Agents today).

BGP Monitor aggregated prefixes and prefix selector filter

Based on feedback from certain customers we realized that the BGP test results were noisy and it was hard to get a high level view of the number of changes and prefixes involved before digging into the details. We have made three changes to address this:

• We are aggregating the result set by prefix and grouping them into collapsed groups.
• The header for each group indicates the total number of BGP events grouped by type (Announcements, Withdrawals and Unexpected Origin events).
• A prefix selector on the top right allows users to easily filter down to a specific prefix and doing so only shows events for that specific prefix over the selected time range.

Support for all notification channel types in Synthetics

When we added support for alerts and notifications in Synthetics about a year ago, we supported Slack, email and JSON/webhook. We did the work necessary to support and template all the other notification types and have exposed them in the UI.

Kentik Cloud

As usual, the cloud team turned around a ton of great enhancements to the Kentik Cloud and Map products over the last month. This takes us closer to hitting our goal of making Kentik the go-to solution for WAN, ISP and cloud/hybrid network engineers. Here are the highlights:

Weather Map improvements

This month saw one of the largest updates to the Weather Map yet. In this release we’ve incorporated several new features worth discussing. We added layers that allow users to view utilization and/or health data into their map, along with a nifty layer selector:

Utilization layer

A major use case for Weather Map in ISP and large backbone networks is to assist users in performing capacity planning exercises. In order to accomplish this, we needed to color the map based on interface utilization rather than total bytes. This means that our new map breaks down the interface utilization of a single interface or an aggregated bundle and buckets these interfaces into 10 groups of increasing utilization.

We also needed to add in support for interface bundling as well as support visually aggregated interfaces when more than one link connects a site cluster to another site or another cluster. To support this, we use the backend attributes that we poll from our customer’s SNMP data to determine if an interface is configured as part of a bundle or is operating as a single interface.

If a link is drawn between two site clusters, we’ll aggregate the bandwidth over both links and calculate the total utilization on the fly:

When a user clicks on this link, the system allows them to choose which link they’d like to focus on:

Weather Map sidebar improvements

We’ve also added in sidebar improvements that make selections of Sites and Links easier. Consider the following example. A user has clicked on the 3 site cluster in the Chicago region on the KentikDemoNew map:

The sidebar now opens up with a running count of the sites and links interconnecting the sites.

Expanding these elements allows a customer to interactively browse the map:

Health Layer

The team has also started to resurface health on the Weather Map. We started by adding health into the cluster popovers as such:

Of course, we also show the site health on the canvas and sidebar as well. Here we see an unhealthy ORD1 site on the canvas:

And a list of all of the sites within a view color-coded by health in the sidebar:

You might notice that we also now color links by health. We currently have two link-health states — down and degraded:

Down indicates that the router that originates or terminates a link has reported an ifOperStatus of DOWN or administratively shut down, while Degraded state means that the system is reporting errors.

Next up, we’ll be introducing detailed health status into the sidebar as well as a health digest feature inside of the Weather Map, allowing users to browse all of the determined health issues the system has discovered and in Q2, we’ll allow users to set their own thresholds for each device’s CPU, memory and introduce interface utilization health.

Mini-map site topology

A popular request we’ve heard is to show a user’s site topology without having to load the entire site view. We’ve taken a stab at this feature (feedback welcome!) and now show the site topology in the sidebar itself. This is useful for getting at-a-glance understandings of how sites are constructed and is a step closer to our next iteration which allows users to see the devices that connect to other sites directly on the Weather Map canvas.

DDoS and alerting

Mitigations

• Mitigation controls - integrations complete for policies, support in v4
• Added acknowledgement required for thresholds
• Multiple mitigations are supported per policy (coming soon)
• Mitigation apply/clear timers per policy (coming soon)