Kentik Helps MetroNet Keep Transit Costs Flat as Traffic Grows

We knew we needed a tool that would allow us to analyze how can we save costs or at least make our costs relatively flat. So our main strategy around Kentik and NetFlow data was identifying peering partners, reducing the need for IP transit, especially as we moved into heavy surge like Over-The-Top video traffic that was starting to hit us. We needed to be able to sustain our network cost as we expanded. And we pay less in transit IP costs today than we do when we turned up Kentik. We've added all these different data centers. We've added tons of additional IP transit connectivity, but the volume of traffic has not increased to the point where we're paying more. And so our cost per MIG is lowered over the years. And that's pretty incredible considering our traffic is seven times what it was when we started. We've really been able to sculpt the traffic and understand where we need cache clusters and things that will even do like video replication for the live streams. We've been able to work with providers and provide them detail from Kentik that basically justifies our use cases, shows our network side of things, not just what they see on their side. So I think it's really helped us deliver a better customer experience. The NMS functionality is a little bit newer. Where I've used that the most actually is for our acquisition companies because I can do a quick SNMP walk. I can put an agent within their network tied to the cloud service, right? So even if we're not done with all of our advertisements or their management connectivity, I can walk that network and understand a lot of different things about it. I can search just about anything with the search bar, and it pulls up a lot of options. And so I can quickly get the solutions. If, you know, I'm curious about some CDN event or something like that, I can type the name of the CDN right in the search and I can pull it up and I can look at the CDN analytics. I can see that spike or whatever I think I may have expected and see how that really impacted us on our different connectivity types. It takes the time to break down the steps of how it's creating the report so it's kind of teaching you as it does it and then it represents the data much quicker than it would have taken me and you can keep refining it. It's actually been very valuable for us and easy to use so that's been great. Kentik has been one of the tools that we start individuals on first to help them learn the network and get into it and explore, right? And it's really helped us on our onboarding and actually gaining what we're hoping out of those resources.