Kentik Blog

Apple announced two new data centers in Iowa. Cisco made another acquisition. VMware reported a strong quarter. DDoS attacks spiked. Google sped up TCP/IP. And Wired put together an interactive map to show where internet trolls live. More headlines after the jump…

With much of the country looking skyward during the solar eclipse, you might wonder how much of an effect there was on network traffic. Was there a drastic drop as millions of watchers were briefly uncoupled from their screens? Or was that offset by a massive jump in live streaming and photo uploads? In this post we report on what we found using forensic analytics in Kentik Detect to slice traffic based on how and where usage patterns changed during the event.

Domain Name Server (DNS) is often overlooked, but it’s one of the most critical pieces of Internet infrastructure. As driven home by last October’s crippling DDoS attack against Dyn, the web can’t function unless DNS resolves hostnames to their underlying IP addresses. In this post we look at how combining Kentik’s software host agent with Dashboards in Kentik gives you the tools you need to ensure DNS availability and performance.

Web companies put the brakes on hate group Daily Stormer using their services. The EFF responded with a warning. A new DDoS attack known as “pulse wave” was uncovered. DDoS attacks hit a bunch of Blizzard Entertainment games. And the biggest shipping company said a single attack cost it nearly $300 million.

Kentik addresses the day-to-day challenges of network operations, but our unique big network data platform also generates valuable business insights. A great example of this duality is our new Interface Classification feature, which streamlines an otherwise-tedious technical task while also giving sales teams a real competitive advantage. In this post we look at what it can do, how we’ve implemented it, and how to get started.

Docker’s $1.3 billion valuation. Disney $1.6 billion acquisition for streaming services. And international internet speed tests and U.S. home internet data caps. Those stories and more after the jump.

Major cyber-security incidents keep on coming, the latest being the theft from HBO of 1.5 terabytes of private data. We often frame Kentik Detect’s advanced anomaly detection and alerting system in terms of defense against DDoS attacks, but large-scale transfer of data from private servers to unfamiliar destinations also creates anomalous traffic. In this post we look at several ways to configure our alerting system to see breaches like the attack on HBO.

With BGP and NetFlow correlated into a unified datastore, Kentik Detect’s advanced analytics provide valuable insights for both engineering and sales. In this post we look into a fairly recent addition to Kentik Detect, Route Traffic Analytics. Especially useful for capacity planners and peering coordinators, RTA makes it easy to see how many unique routes are represented in a given percent of your traffic, which indicates the route capacity needed in your edge routers.

DDoS attacks for all: Netflix tests against these disruptive attacks. Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan talks about how service providers need better DDoS mitigation. New Kaspersky Lab research recognized a Chinese telecom as seeing the biggest DDoS attack in Q2. More after the jump…

Can BGP routing tables provide actionable insights for both engineering and sales? Kentik Detect correlates BGP with flow records like NetFlow to deliver advanced analytics that unlock valuable knowledge hiding in your routes. In this post, we look at our Peering Analytics feature, which lets you see whether your traffic is taking the most cost-effective and performant routes to get where it’s going, including who you should be peering with to reduce transit costs.