Kentik Blog: Company

Leon Adato takes a lighthearted and personal look back at 2024, reflecting on the standout moments and trends that caught his eye throughout the year. In his signature off-the-cuff style, Leon shares his unique perspective on the past year’s highlights.

Cassette tapes are back…sort of! Revisit the joys (and frustrations) of these iconic rectangles of the past with the Kentik Network Jamz Mixtape Bluetooth Speaker — all the retro vibes, none of the tangled ribbons. Find out how to snag one and join the fun at AWS re:Invent or by sharing your best network-themed song title!

We are excited to share that Kentik has been named a Value Leader in EMA’s 2024 Radar Report for Network Operations Observability. This recognition highlights our continued commitment to building an AI-powered, end-to-end observability platform for modern networks, helping network and cloud teams optimize their infrastructures for availability, performance, cost-efficiency, and security.

NANOG 92 has wrapped up, and Kentik’s Field CTO, Justin Ryburn, is here to recap the event. From Kentik-led sessions to IPv6 adoption, real-time routing analysis, and networking for AI data centers, learn about everything that made NANOG 92 an event to remember.

Jezzibell Gilmore joins Kentik as general manager, service provider, bringing her expertise to expand the company’s global service provider business. Read why she made the move to Kentik in her own words.

The year might be ending, but the Kentik news never stops. We’re back with our bite-sized roundup of everything you might have missed at Kentik in December 2023.

Have you ever sat down and thought to yourself, “What’s new at Kentik?” Well, you’re in luck! Welcome to the first edition of a blog series to highlight the best and brightest of Kentik that month.

The most noticeable takeaway from All Things Open 2023 was how visibly and demonstrably people were there for the event itself. Not to check a box or browse the swag but to be together, show their support of open source, and glean every last bit of knowledge they could.

Today we expand our partnership with New Relic. Together, we’re deepening New Relic’s full-stack observability into the network layer and giving IT operations, SREs and development teams shared context to resolve issues quickly.

The most complex point of today’s networks is the edge, where there are more protocols, diverse traffic, and security exposure. The network edge is also a place where Kentik provides high value. In this post, we discuss how to implement Kentik in your data center.

During Networking Field Day 19, Kentik presented on new capabilities for service providers, cloud and cloud-native environments, and gave a technical talk on tagging and data enrichment. In this post, we recap the event highlights and provide the videos for watching and sharing.

Kentik is growing! Today we marked our permanent landing in Europe. Kentik’s SaaS solution has already been embraced by dozens of organizations across the European continent — and our new presence will support even more organizations who deliver or depend on routed networks and the Internet as an essential part of their operations and business.

If you’ve spent any amount of time with Kentik Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman, you know he’s a networking nerd at heart. You may have also heard of his past (and sometimes current pastime) as a high-stakes poker player. Now, in merging two of Avi’s passions together, we’ve launched Kentik Poker!

We’re very excited to share that KDDI, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, has selected the Kentik platform for network planning, operations, and to protect their key network assets and services. Read about the reasons that KDDI chose Kentik and why we’re so excited about this announcement.

Kentik is pleased to announce our membership in the Internet2® consortium, which operates a nationwide research and education (R&E) network and establishes best practices for R&E networking. Because Internet2 is a major source of innovation, our participation will enable us to grow our connection to the higher education networking community, to learn from member perspectives, and to support the advancement of applications and services for R&E networks.

Cisco’s late-January acquisition of AppDynamics confirms what was already evident from Kentik’s experience in 2016, which is that effective visibility is now recognized industry-wide as a critical requirement for success. AppDynamics provides APM, the full value of which can’t be realized without the modern NPM offered by Kentik Detect. In this post we look at how Kentik uniquely complements APM to provide a comprehensive visibility solution.

While Kentik Detect’s ground-breaking DDoS detection is field-proven to catch 30% more attacks than legacy systems, our DDoS capabilities aren’t limited to standalone detection. We’re also actively working with leading mitigation providers to create end-to-end DDoS protection solutions. So we’re excited to be partnering with A10 Networks, whose products help defend some of the largest networks in the world, to enable seamless integration of Kentik Detect with A10 Thunder TPS mitigation.

Kentik is honored to be the sole network monitoring provider named by Forrester Research as a “Breakout Vendor” in a December 2016 report on the Virtual Network Infrastructure (VNI) space. The report asserts that I&O leaders can dramatically improve customer experience by choosing cloud networking solutions, and cites Kentik Detect as one of four groundbreaking products that are poised to supercede typical networking incumbents.

Avi Freedman recently spoke with Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro of PacketPushers about Kentik’s latest updates, which focus primarily on features that enhance network performance monitoring and DDoS protection. This post includes excerpts from that conversation as well as a link to the full podcast. Avi discusses his vision of appliance-free network monitoring, explains how host monitoring expands Kentik’s functionality, and gives an overview of how we detect and respond to anomalies and attacks.

Kentik’s recent recognition as an IDC Innovator for Cloud-Based Network Monitoring was based not only on our orientation as a cloud-based SaaS but also on the deep capabilities of Kentik Detect. In this post we look at how our purpose-built distributed architecture enables us to keep up with raw network traffic data while providing a unified network intelligence solution, including traffic analysis, performance monitoring, Internet peering, and DDoS protection.

In our second post related to BrightTalk videos recorded with Kentik at Cisco Live 2016, Kentik CEO Avi Freedman talks about the increasing threats that digital businesses face from DDoS and other forms of attacks and service interruptions. Avi also discusses the attributes that are required or desirable in a network visibility solution in order to effectively protect a network.

Cisco Live 2016 gave us a chance to meet with BrightTalk for some video-recorded discussions on hot topics in network operations. This post focuses on the first of those videos, in which Kentik’s Jim Frey, VP Strategic Alliances, talks about the complexity of today’s networks and how Big Data NetFlow analysis helps operators achieve timely insight into their traffic.

It was a blast taking part in our first ever Networking Field Day (NFD12), presenting our advanced and powerful network traffic analysis solution. Being at NFD12 gave us the opportunity to get valuable response and feedback from a set of knowledgeable network nerd and blogger delegates. See what they had to say about Kentik Detect…

Cisco’s announcement of Tetration Analytics means that IT and network leaders can no longer ignore the need for Big Data intelligence. In this post, Kentik CEO Avi Freedman explains how that’s good for Kentik, which has been pushing hard for this particular industry transition. Cisco’s appliance-based approach is distinct from the SaaS option that most customers choose for Kentik Detect, but Tetration’s focus on Big Data analytics provides important validation that Kentik is on the right track.

By mapping customer traffic merged with topology and BGP data, Kentik Detect now provides a way to visualize traffic flow across across your network, through the Internet, and to a destination. This new Peering Analytics feature will primarily be used to determine who to peer (interconnect) with. But as you’ll see, Peering Analytics has use cases far beyond peering.

Taken together, three additional attributes of Kentik Detect — self-service, API-enabled, and multi-tenant — further enhance the fundamental advantages of Kentik’s cloud-based big data approach to network visibility.