Telxius strengthens its global network and saves time doing it with Kentik

Overview

With a Tier-1 backbone (AS12956) with more than 20 Tbps capacity that connects North and South America to Europe, Telxius offers high-speed internet access to the main operators and ISPs. It provides international coverage with 61 IP points of presence (PoPs) in 16 countries, as well as innovative value-added services. That’s why understanding IP network traffic is vital to the organization’s success. It’s also why they turned to Kentik for network observability and market intelligence.

Situation

As the world’s needs for uninterrupted global interconnectivity continue to rise, Telxius is preparing the road ahead. They continue to expand an unrivaled global ecosystem of digital infrastructure based on more than 80,000 km of high-capacity fiber optic submarine cables, including terrestrial backhauls, close to 100 PoPs in 18 countries, 25 landing stations and two communications hubs connecting to the main data centers in the world. They provide a wide range of capacity, colocation and security services, as well as direct internet connectivity through their Tier-1 IP network, which connects North and South America to Europe. Telxius is one of the largest transit providers in the world. It’s the top Tier 1 provider for Spanish-speaking countries and also the top transit provider in South America.

With an impressive and growing global footprint, always-on connectivity is vital to Telxius’ success. Specifically, Telxius needs to understand how traffic comes into its network and how it’s distributed. Any slow-downs or unexpected traffic spikes, even for short durations, can directly and negatively impact customers.

The existing network monitoring tool Telxius was using had limitations on traffic filtering. “Kentik provides more detail to understand all aspects of network traffic to support our business decisions with more information,” said Rafael Castell, head of product marketing at Telxius.

Solution

Telxius turned to the Kentik Network Observability Platform. “Very quickly after adopting the Kentik platform, we could drill into the different aspects of our traffic to understand it all,” said Castell.

The Kentik Network Observability Platform enables Telxius to monitor all its critical network connections to ensure optimal performance, security, cost-effectiveness and manageability.

Telxius also deployed Kentik Market Intelligence (KMI). KMI is a tool that allows service providers to observe and evaluate the size, market share and the relationship of ASes globally and regionally. With KMI, organizations like Telxius can see how ASes rank in their markets of interest.

“The combination of the Kentik Network Observability Platform and Kentik Market Intelligence has tremendously advanced our observability efforts and helped us add to our competitive edge,” Castell noted.

Results

Understanding traffic with network observability

“The most important views we look at with Kentik are the top talkers, including top ASes producing traffic and top countries producing traffic,” said Castell. “We can understand amounts of traffic we’re delivering from other countries.”

With these insights from Kentik, Telxius can manage infrastructure investments, capacity plan and optimize peering agreements.

“The level of traffic insights Kentik provides also helps us quickly investigate network events, like DDoS attacks,” adds Castell. “Until now, we were limited to looking at the traffic by only two filters. Now, with Kentik, we can apply as many filters as we need to and know exactly how and where to focus our efforts for mitigation.”

Gaining competitive advantage with KMI

“It’s a top priority for any company to know how they’re doing against competitors, and that’s why Kentik Market Intelligence is helpful for us,” said Castell.

“With KMI, we can track how we rank against other transit providers in any specific region or geography,” he added. “If we drop in a specific area, we make a note and take action to work harder and find more and better ways to deliver traffic to the area.”

With KMI, Telxius can also see which competitors are adding or dropping customers, as well as which prospects are single-homed, representing a sales opportunity.

“In short, KMI is a vital tool to help you understand how hard you need to keep pushing to get to top positions,” said Castell.

Preventing BGP hijacks — and saving time while doing it

It is becoming a best practice to reject Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI)-invalid routes, which Telxius will soon also do. Many network operators are doing this to protect outbound traffic from accidental BGP hijacks without posing a risk to legitimate traffic.

With RPKI Analysis from Kentik, Telxius can alert its customers to any invalid prefixes they announce to prevent a BGP hijack.

“BGP announcements are live and changing constantly, so if you look at this information in real time, you’ll likely overlook something,” noted Castell. “With Kentik, we can look back at the last 30 days and see peaks in a sleek chart, and notify any customers accordingly.”

“It previously took us a week to manually pull together a report with this level of detail,” said Castell. “With Kentik, it now takes us a couple seconds, and we can send reports directly from the Kentik portal.”

Takeaway

“We are very happy with Kentik and the network observability that the platform provides,” says Castell. “We have gained great visibility, we’re faster at reporting to our customers, managers and teams, and we have a much wider view of our network.”