Kentik Blog

There’s a horrible tragedy taking place every day wherever legacy visibility systems are deployed: the needless slaughter of innocent NetFlow data records. NetFlow is cruelly disposed of, and the details it can reveal are blithely ignored in favor of shallow summaries. Kentik VP of Marketing Alex Henthorn-Iwane reports on this pressing issue and explains what each of us can do to help Save the NetFlow.

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.

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…

The recorded music market used to be dependent on physical objects to distribute recordings to buyers. Now it’s as if our headphone cords stretch all the way from our smartphones to the datacenter. That makes network performance and availability mission-critical for music services — and anyone else who serve ads, processes transactions, or delivers content. Which explains why some of the world’s top music services use Kentik Detect for network traffic analysis.

BGP used to be primarily of interest only to ISPs and hosting providers, but it’s become something with which all network engineers should get familiar. In this conclusion to our four-part BGP tutorial series, we fill in a few more pieces of the puzzle, including when — and when not — it makes sense to advertise your routes to a service provider using BGP.