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Tag: Kentik

  • Kentik Open Sources Five Projects to Advance Network Observability

    Kentik Open Sources Five Projects to Advance Network Observability

    Kentik today unfurled a developer hub, dubbed Kentik Labs, through which it is making five open source projects available as part of an effort to advance observability across network operations (NetOps).

    The five projects are:

    kTranslate: A system for pulling and pushing network data that is the basis of the Kentik Firehose integration the company created for the New Relic observability platform

    NetDiag: Scalable, asynchronous implementations of low-level network diagnostics

    Convis: Example code showing how to attribute process and container information to network traffic via the Linux kernel using eBPF

    kProbe: A high-performance host and sensor network probe (PCAP)

    Grafana App: A real-time tool for ingesting and querying network data

    Nick Stinemates, vice president of business development at Kentik and co-chair of Kentik Labs, said the goal is to enable DevOps teams to incorporate NetOps within the workflows already being employed to programmatically manage the rest of IT.

    Stinemates noted that, as IT environments become more distributed, managing NetOps has become more challenging. If there is a failure, it can be difficult for DevOps teams to determine if the issue is due to application code, the underlying infrastructure or some other root cause. Kentik Labs is committed to providing tools that will help DevOps teams reduce their mean time to recovery (MTTR), he added.

    Most NetOps teams increasingly rely on software to manage distributed networks either in the form of graphical tools provided by router and switch vendors or by using the Python programming language and the open source Ansible automation framework that enables IT teams to declaratively manage IT infrastructure.

    As the teams that manage network operations gain more proficiency with those tools, it becomes simpler to incorporate them within the construct of a larger DevOps team. While DevOps teams have been programmatically managing IT infrastructure-as-code (IaC) for years, network management has largely remained in a separate silo. However, as more applications are deployed in the cloud, it’s clear NetOps needs to become more integrated with the rest of the workflows employed to deploy and manage a highly distributed IT environment, said Stinemates.

    Less clear is to what degree the networks that make up a hybrid cloud computing environment will continue to be managed by network administrators versus site reliability engineers (SREs) that are starting to assume responsibility for managing compute and storage.

    Regardless of who manages the network, the next generation of microservices-based applications that are dependent on application programming interfaces (APIs) to call various services are much more latency-sensitive than previous generations of applications. Many of those applications will regularly experience performance issues due to networking issues that are often not readily apparent to DevOps teams. The goal should be to, at the very least, arm those DevOps teams with the tools required to confirm the source of those issues before a “war room” is convened to determine how to address the issue.

  • Kentik Brings Network Observability to Public Cloud Environments

    Company Tackles Top Three Cloud Issues for Enterprises: Visibility, Performance and Cost Control

    San Francisco, CA, May 18, 2021 — Kentik®, the network observability company, today announced the launch of Kentik Cloud, a new product suite for public cloud environments. As part of the Kentik platform, Kentik Cloud fuses traffic and telemetry data with business, security, internet and cloud metadata to give enterprise customers increased visibility, improved performance and better cost control of the networking that connects their entire cloud environment.

    Cloud-forward companies like Box, eBay, Dropbox, IBM, Kayak and Zoom use Kentik to plan, run and fix their networks. The launch of Kentik Cloud extends observability to public clouds, putting forward the industry’s most comprehensive way to visualize cloud network performance, troubleshoot connectivity issues, control and reduce traffic costs, optimize service delivery, migrate apps to the cloud and secure cloud environments from network attacks.

    In a recent article, Major League Baseball’s Principal Network Automation Engineer Jeremy Schulman discussed how Kentik helps the sports league see “how much traffic is going in and out of various projects in the cloud. [Kentik] is actually showing you a visual representation of how your physical equipment connects via those virtual private connections in the cloud. It also gives us information like latency, throughput, and jitter, across on-prem, through the cloud, and back on-prem.”

    Kentik Cloud expands on the company’s existing cloud monitoring capabilities with four core new feature sets:

    • Observation Deck™: an integrated user experience with configurable widgets that lets users put their most important data and insights front and center, and quickly answer any question about the network, using all types of network telemetry and contextual data.
    • Kentik Map: an end-to-end visual depiction of virtual private clouds (VPCs), on-premises networks and the connectivity between them to see traffic to and through the cloud network elements for faster troubleshooting. This feature also brings together AWS CloudWatch and infrastructure health metrics.
    • Cloud Performance Monitor: a feature that automatically detects the most important network paths used inside cloud networks and interconnections to on-prem networks. Proactive tests measure latency, jitter and packet loss data, and interface with Kentik’s large network of public cloud agents for easy performance monitoring of internet and multi-cloud services.
    • Cloud Traffic Cost Explorer: a tool to automatically calculate actual costs of cloud network traffic over time, as well as cost projections by group and account, helping to lower data transfer costs by quickly finding traffic inefficiencies.

    “We built the Kentik Cloud product suite because we saw our customers struggling to run cloud networks with the precision and control that they’re accustomed to,” said Christoph Pfister, Chief Product Officer at Kentik. “Most cloud monitoring tools don’t focus on infrastructure or can’t see beyond a single cloud environment — and the old networking tools simply don’t keep up with the pace of CloudOps, if they even understand cloud networking constructs or VPC Flow Logs. With Kentik Cloud, our customers can manage the performance, visibility and costs of their cloud networking, at-scale and all within one solution.”

    For more information on Kentik Cloud, sign up to attend the next Kentik Virtual Design Clinic on Wednesday, June 23, 2021.

    ABOUT KENTIK
    Kentik is the network observability company. Our platform is a must-have for the network front line, whether digital business, corporate IT or service provider. Network professionals turn to the Kentik Network Observability Cloud to plan, run and fix any network, relying on our infinite granularity, AI-driven insights and insanely fast search. Kentik makes sense of network, cloud, host and container flow, internet routing, performance tests and network metrics. We show networking pros what they need to know about their network performance, health and security to make their business-critical services shine. Networks power the world’s most valuable companies, and those companies trust Kentik for network observability. Market leaders like IBM, Box and Zoom rely on Kentik for network observability. Visit us at kentik.com and follow us at @kentikinc.

  • Kentik: Cloud Native Applications Need Network Analytics

    Kentik: Cloud Native Applications Need Network Analytics

    Moving everything into the cloud seems to have taken the spotlight from the network. As the internet is ubiquitous, who worries about the networks? Kentik has a notion that in the age of cloud native, network analytics are as important as ever. In fact, network analytics may be more important than ever.

    I sat down with Jonah Kowall, CTO of Kentik, to discuss this issue. Of course having Jonah here in our Digital Anarchist studios, allowed us to explore some other areas including Jonah’s experience as a Gartner analyst, and then working at AppDynamics.

    Kentik is doing some really interesting things around network analytics to help app performance and even security. The use cases for this are pretty broad. From edge, to cloud (multi-cloud and hybrid), data center and containers, Kentik has a great use case.

    With so much going on with NewOps, NoOps (I hate this one), AIOps, DataOps and more, it sure does seem like Ops is the place to be these days. On top of this, as much as things change, it seems that what’s old is new and no matter what, the network still matters.

    Have a listen as Jonah explains further:

     

    — Alan Shimel