Optimize Peering and Transit
The most advanced peering tool in the world is also the easiest to use.
Build data-driven peering strategies in minutes.
Replace manual processes with automated workflows, alerting, and insights.
Save millions in annual traffic costs.
Reduce connectivity costs
- Find potential peering targets and understand the impact to new and existing connectivity.
- Evaluate peering partners, see traffic ratios, and build data-backed cases for interconnection to reduce transit costs.
- Manage all connectivity costs and understand drivers of network spend.
- Consolidate invoices and instrument contract negotiation.
Learn more in the Peering Coordinators’ Handbook.
Improve network performance
- Master your digital supply chain and track drivers behind traffic growth by CDN, OTT apps, and services.
- See OTT service growth trends, proactively detect new services, and optimize interconnections.
- Drill into performance analysis from transit, IX, and private peering per subscriber.
- Find and fix CDN traffic origin misconfigurations.
Uncover global AS relationships and insights
- Identify providers, peers, and customers for any AS in any geography.
- Access integrated PeeringDB data to see peering policies and contact information, traffic ratios, and common footprint.
- Support IP transit sales prospecting and peering requests.
- Get custom alerts on competitors, markets, and insights you care about.
“The combination of Kentik Market Intelligence and PeeringDB enables more efficient evaluations of IP transit and peering arrangements in markets that interest us. The map view of common data centers with our customers or prospects significantly assists our sales teams in evaluating opportunities and threats in their markets.”
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Peering and Transit Optimization FAQs
How do ISPs optimize peering and transit to reduce latency and cost?
ISPs use Kentik’s Peering & Interconnection workflows to analyze traffic patterns, AS paths and cost models so they can choose where to peer, which IXes to use and how to balance traffic across transit and peering to reduce latency for subscribers and lower cost per Mbps.
How can I monitor CDN performance and routing decisions?
Kentik classifies traffic by CDN and service and lets you compare CDN performance and routing across different interconnect types and providers so you can see how content is handed off, which routes perform best and where CDN routing decisions may be hurting user experience.
How can I monitor and tune CDN origin fetch performance?
Origin fetch (cache-fill) traffic can create hidden congestion and cost when it takes inefficient paths, lands on the wrong interconnect, or shifts due to CDN routing changes. The practical way to tune it is to separate subscriber-facing delivery from cache-fill, then analyze where origin fetch enters your network (provider, site, interconnect, and path) and how those choices affect latency and upstream load. Kentik supports this by distinguishing subscriber traffic from cache-fill flows and showing how origin fetch traffic enters by provider, site, and path, so you can spot inefficient origin routes or misconfigurations and then tune peering, PNIs, or cache placement to reduce load and improve performance.
What tools help compare internet paths across different providers?
Kentik correlates flow and BGP data so you can see AS paths, providers, latency and volume for traffic to specific destinations across different ISPs, making it easy to compare Internet paths and choose the best-performing or most cost-effective routes.
What tools can analyze cost per bit delivered across interconnects?
Kentik’s Traffic Costs features calculate cost-per-Mbps for each interconnect by combining utilization and volume data with your pricing, giving you real-time visibility into how much you pay per bit on each transit and peering link.
How do I detect saturation on interconnects before congestion occurs?
Kentik’s flow analytics and utilization dashboards show real-time and historical bandwidth on transit and peering links and highlight top talkers, letting you identify interconnects that are trending toward saturation so you can upgrade or re-balance traffic before congestion and packet loss appear.
How can I right-size transit and IX capacity for peak traffic?
To right-size transit and IX capacity, Kentik lets you treat each interconnect and IX port as a capacity-planning object: it tracks current utilization, peak traffic, and long-term trends, then projects when those links will hit critical thresholds. By combining this with Kentik’s interconnect and cost analytics, you can decide when to upgrade specific transit or IX ports — and where peering or traffic engineering can offload traffic instead of blindly over-provisioning.
How do I analyze performance differences by AS and region?
Kentik enriches flows with ASN and geo metadata, so you can filter and compare traffic and performance by AS and region and see which providers and geographies deliver better latency, throughput or reliability for your users.
What tools help compare internet paths across different providers?
Kentik correlates flow and BGP data so you can see AS paths, providers, latency and volume for traffic to specific destinations across different ISPs, making it easy to compare Internet paths and choose the best-performing or most cost-effective routes.
How can I optimize transit mix to reduce latency hotspots?
Optimize transit mix by measuring latency across key paths, identifying which transit/peering routes create hotspots, and shifting traffic to better-performing peers or upstreams. Kentik combines synthetic latency testing with peering analytics (Discover Peers) so you can find low-latency interconnection options and verify improvements after routing or policy changes.
What’s the most efficient way to find hot-potato vs cold-potato routing?
Hot-potato routing hands traffic off to another network as quickly as possible (closest-exit), while cold-potato routing carries traffic farther inside your network before handing it off (best-exit), and the fastest way to identify which behavior you’re getting is to compare where traffic exits your AS for the same destination across locations and time, then relate those exits to latency and cost outcomes. Kentik supports this by combining routing context (AS paths and hops) with traffic analytics and traffic-engineering workflows so teams can see where they hand off traffic, test the impact of potential routing changes, and validate the results after adjusting policy or interconnect strategy.