Kentik Blog: Performance Monitoring

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.

Encryption forced NPM vendors to evolve. In part 2 of this series, let’s discuss NPM’s evolution, including synthetic testing as one recent advancement.

Encryption and cloud adoption are creating hurdles for network performance monitoring vendors. To survive, solutions must evolve or die.

Read how this leading internet services provider in Latin America uses Kentik for peering and capacity planning and a real-time view of performance and availability throughout the network.

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.

As Gartner Research Director Sanjit Ganguli pointed out last May, network performance monitoring appliances that were designed for the era of WAN-connected data centers leave significant blind spots when monitoring modern applications that are distributed across the cloud. In this post Jim Frey, VP Strategic Alliances, explores Ganguli’s analysis and explains how Kentik NPM closes the gaps.

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.