Kentik Blog: Network Performance

As organizations continue to shift their operations to cloud networks, maintaining the performance and security of these systems becomes increasingly important. Read on to learn about incident management and the tools and strategies organizations can use to reduce MTTR and incident response times in their networks.

Live sports have moved to the internet and are now streaming instead of being broadcast. Traditional streaming protocols have a built-in delay that challenges the experience of a live game. Amazon Prime has found a solution by combining a new protocol with a very distributed CDN.

What do network operators want most from all their hard work? The answer is a stable, reliable, performant network that delivers great application experiences to people. In daily network operations, that means deep, extensive, and reliable network observability. In other words, the answer is a data-driven approach to gathering and analyzing a large volume and variety of network telemetry so that engineers have the insight they need to keep things running smoothly.

Network telemetry and DataOps play a critical role in enhancing network visibility. By combining both, organizations can improve network visibility and gain insight to help them optimize their network performance, improve security, and enhance the overall user experience.

Most of the applications we use today are delivered over the internet. That means there’s valuable application telemetry embedded right in the network itself. To solve today’s application performance problems, we need to take a network-centric approach that recognizes there’s much more to application performance monitoring than reviewing code and server logs.

If you missed Akamai, Uber and Verizon Media talking about networking during COVID-19, read our recap of Kentik’s recent virtual panel. In this post, we share details from the conversation, including observed spikes in traffic growth, network capacity challenges, BC/DR plans, the internet infrastructure supply chain, and more.

The Gartner Market Guide for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics recently published and revealed new network challenges for buyers. In this post, we take a deeper look at the challenges, as well as opportunities for NPMD investment.

At Kentik, we’re always interested in monitoring trends in network traffic. This helps to inform our community and customers globally about potential opportunities and threats to network operations. In this ongoing blog post, we’ll provide updates to trends in traffic in correlation with COVID-19.

“My advice to anyone who is considering Kentik is to get into it. Get a trial, import your data, and start playing with it,” says Rick Carter, head of networks at Superloop and Kentik user. In this vlog, Rick shares how Kentik helps Superloop bring connectivity to APAC by uncovering important network and business insights.

Disney+ launched with an impressive debut, especially considering that technical problems, potentially capacity issues, plagued the service shortly after launch. In this post, we look at Disney+ traffic peaks around launch. We also explain why, during high-profile launches like that of Disney+, broadband subscribers are likely to blame their provider for any perceived problems. Network operators must be able to understand the dynamics of new loads placed on the network by new services and plan accordingly.

At that ONUG Spring 2018 event, ACG analyst Stephen Collins moderated a panel discussion on re-tooling IT operations with machine learning and AI. The panelists provided a view “from the trenches.” In this post, Collins shares insights into how panelists’ organizations are applying ML and AI today, each in different operational domains, but with a common theme of overcoming the challenge of managing operations at scale.

Predictive analytics has improved over the past few years, benefiting from advances in AI and related fields. In this post, we look at how predictive analytics can be used to help network operations. We also dig into the limitations and how the accuracy of the predictions depends heavily on the quality the data collected.

The adoption of hyperscale principles presents data center operators with massive scale visibility challenges. Yet it’s inevitable. In this post, ACG analyst Stephen Collins discusses why operators need to prepare for the inevitable by acquiring and mastering the new tools needed to assure the performance, reliability and security of these applications.

Industry 4.0 is the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector. In this post, ACG Research’s Principal Analyst Stephen Collins looks at the major implications that Industry 4.0 will create for enterprise IT systems, software and network infrastructure, and how to model, monitor and control it all.

Not long ago network flow data was a secondary source of data for IT departments trying to better understand their network status, traffic, and utilization. Today it’s become a leading focus of analysis, yielding valuable insights in areas including network security, network optimization, and business processes. In this post, senior analyst Shamus McGillicudy of EMA looks at the value and versatility of flow for network analytics.

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.

Earlier this year the folks over at RouterFreak did a very thorough review of Kentik Detect. We really respected their thoroughness and the fact that they are practicing network engineers, so as we’ve come up with cool new gizmos in our product, we’ve asked them to extend their review. This post highlights some excerpts from their latest review, with particular focus on Kentik NPM, our enhanced network performance monitoring solution.

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.

How does Kentik NPM help you track down network performance issues? In this post by Jim Meehan, Director of Solutions Engineering, we look at how we recently used our own NPM solution to determine if a spike in retransmits was due to network issues or a software update we’d made on our application servers. You’ll see how we ruled out the software update, and were then able to narrow the source of the issue to a specific route using BGP AS Path.

In this post, based on a webinar presented by Jim Frey, VP Strategic Alliances at Kentik, we look at how changes in network traffic flows — the shift to the Cloud, distributed applications, and digital business in general — has upended the traditional approach to network performance monitoring, and how NPM is evolving to handle these new realities.

Kentik recently launched Kentik NPM, a network performance monitoring solution for today’s digital business. Integrated into Kentik Detect, Kentik NPM addresses the visibility gaps left by legacy appliances, using lightweight software agents to gather performance metrics from real traffic. This podcast with Kentik CEO Avi Freedman explores Kentik NPM as a game-changer for performance monitoring.

Network performance is mission-critical for digital business, but traditional NPM tools provide only a limited, siloed view of how performance impacts application quality and user experience. Solutions Engineer Eric Graham explains how Kentik NPM uses lightweight distributed host agents to integrate performance metrics into Kentik Detect, enabling real-time performance monitoring and response without expensive centralized appliances.