Announcing Cloud Pathfinder: Network GPS for Infrastructure Teams
Summary
Today, we’re excited to launch Cloud Pathfinder, an AI-powered path assessment service built into Kentik Journeys. Read on to learn how Cloud Pathfinder gives you instant, turn-by-turn insight into cloud routing—mapping out every hop, gateway, VPC/VNet, and attachment along the way.
This is the age of AI. But beyond the hype, the era of the (human) infrastructure engineer is still going strong. As we advance AI expertise into specialized fields, it takes discipline to eliminate tedious workflows. After all, tedious tasks are boring! But to truly make a difference in the efficiency of an engineering team – and its impact on the business – we must drive for high accuracy, utility, and usability, as we automate the work that burns out our most talented people and drains engineering productivity.
Cutting out toil with Kentik AI
When it comes to network expertise, many engineers, even in the infrastructure space, lack the deep knowledge required to quickly make sense of telemetry and take action. That’s why we’re expanding the Kentik platform to include new network intelligence capabilities. Today, we launch Cloud Pathfinder, an AI path assessment service integrated with Kentik Journeys.
Kentik’s Cloud Pathfinder is the quickest way to understand the exact route between two cloud endpoints, including all the resources involved in each hop, like gateways and their attachments, and VPCs or VNets. Provided two instances, IPs, elastic network interface, or subnet identifiers, Cloud Pathfinder automatically crawls the path between them, giving turn-by-turn guidance through complex cloud network topologies if a route exists. If there is no route, or if an Access Control List (ACL) or Security Group blocks connectivity, Cloud Pathfinder indicates those rules and their metadata to take the guesswork out of a fix. Whether or not connectivity is possible, Kentik AI instantly provides a human-readable analysis and recommends a step-by-step resolution.
A lesson in self-service
We’ve learned a lot about self-service from our customers. With many teams across each enterprise tasked with delivering software, the fewer tasks that get blocked on a central infrastructure team, the higher the company’s velocity. “We want teams to be able to access the data they need without constantly relying on the SRE team,” says Nathan, a Principal SRE and Kentik user at a leading identity and access management company. When a support engineer needs to resolve a customer-facing issue quickly, or an app development team needs to be unblocked when preparing a release, Kentik empowers them to quickly and confidently self-serve. This, in turn, empowers central infrastructure engineers to focus on solving the hardest problems facing the business.
Enter Journeys, our AI conversational investigation experience, which offers an accessible entry point to network intelligence for engineers and engineering leaders who don’t consider themselves network experts but need insight from network telemetry to solve problems quickly. Journeys has Kentik’s complete network context baked in. It automatically understands each customer’s network via the most extensive telemetry enrichment on the market, which can highlight all the relevant devices, VPCs, cloud gateways, bandwidth-consuming apps, etc., in a natural language interface augmented by rich visualizations. New capabilities like Cloud Pathfinder represent the next step for Journeys, elevating it from a troubleshooting accelerant to a self-service workflow agent.
Building network intelligence — with you
As we continue to enhance Kentik AI with proactive insights and efficiency drivers like Cloud Pathfinder that automate toilsome workflows, we will keep working with our customers’ infrastructure teams to understand where they need network intelligence the most. We take great pride in helping the engineers behind the world’s largest networks to do much more with less. Since Journeys is built into our platform, you can get started immediately if you already use Kentik in your organization. If not, sign up for a free trial today and drop us a line — we promise, no runbook is too tedious for the brains behind Kentik AI.
