Kentik Blog

If your network visibility tool lets you query only those flow details that you’ve specified in advance then you’re likely vulnerable to threats that you haven’t anticipated. In this post we’ll explore how SQL querying of Kentik Detect’s unified, full-resolution datastore enables you to drill into traffic anomalies, to identify threats, and to define alerts that notify you when similar issues recur.

DDoS attacks impact profits by interrupting revenue and undermining customer satisfaction. To minimize damage, operators must be able to rapidly determine if a traffic spike is a true attack and then to quickly gather the key information required for mitigation. Kentik Detect’s Data Explorer is ideal for precisely that sort of drill-down.

Kentik Detect handles tens of billions of network flow records and many millions of sub-queries every day using a horizontally scaled distributed system with a custom microservice architecture. Instrumentation and metrics play a key role in performance optimization.

The team at Kentik recently tweeted: “#Moneyball your network with deeper, real-time insights from #BigData NetFlow, SNMP & BGP in an easy to use #SaaS.” There are a lot of concepts packed into that statement, so we thought it would be worth unpacking for a closer look.

For many of the organizations we’ve all worked with or known, SNMP gets dumped into RRDTool, and NetFlow is captured into MySQL. This arrangement is simple, well-documented, and works for initial requirements. But simply put, it’s not cost-effective to store flow data at any scale in a traditional relational database.

Kentik Detect’s alerting system generates notifications when network traffic meets user-defined conditions. Notifications containing details about the triggering conditions and the current status may be posted as JSON to Syslog and/or URL. This post shows how to parse the JSON with PHP to enable integration with external ticketing and configuration management systems.

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.

Relational databases like PostgreSQL have long been dominant for data storage and access, but sometimes you need access from your application to data that’s either in a different database format, in a non-relational database, or not in a database at all. As shown in this “how-to” post, you can do that with PostgreSQL’s Foreign Data Wrapper feature.