Kentik Blog
At Kentik, our commitment to our global community is as vital as the technology we build. In 2025, our Kentik Cares Giving Program hit a record-breaking milestone: Our distributed team raised $25,956.47 for global and local charities — a massive 74% increase over last year’s total! Read about the impact we’re making together and why we’ve set our sights even higher for 2026.
Starlink, the revolutionary low-earth-orbit satellite-based internet service, has quickly become one of the most transformative technologies in the world of internet communications. Using over three years of GeoIP data, we analyze the growth of Starlink as it expanded from 41 to 157 countries. This evolution included the emergence of “Community Gateways” and notable GeoIP entries for locations like Mars, Antarctica, SpaceX launch sites, and politically sensitive areas such as the Palestinian Territories, Kosovo, Venezuela, Myanmar, and Sudan.
This post expands on our analysis from last year that revealed that as much as 20% of IPv4 space has migrated out of Ukraine in the years following the Russian invasion in February 2022. This update reveals that AT&T (a popular destination for Ukrainian IPs) has since implemented a policy ridding itself of customers using AS7018 to originate their routes, often to support residential proxies.
AI in network operations is more than chatbots and agents. LLMs make AI easier to use, but the real value comes from the underlying system of telemetry, data pipelines, analytics, ML models, domain knowledge, and workflows that help engineers reason, predict, and act. When designed thoughtfully, AI doesn’t replace engineers. Instead, it augments their expertise and reduces cognitive load across complex network operations.
Iran is in the midst of one of the world’s most severe communications blackouts. This post uses Kentik data to detail how this historic event unfolded, where this event lies in the context of previous Iranian shutdowns, and finally discusses what might be in store next for Iran.
Generic AI fails in network operations because it lacks the “institutional knowledge” of your specific environment and business priorities. Learn how Kentik’s Custom Network Context encodes your unique operational reality into AI Advisor, turning a generic chatbot into a context-aware teammate.
This year-end wrap-up covers topics from BGP security (including ASPA and excessive AS-SETs) and the geopolitical (Ukraine’s IPv4 exodus, the Iran internet shutdown, and Red Sea cable cuts) to the year’s most significant outages (TikTok, the Spain/Portugal blackout, and cloud failures at AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare). Plus, we explore Starlink’s new Community Gateways, and revisit the evolving landscape of AS ranking and OTT service tracking.
Kentik AI Runbooks are machine-readable instructions that codify tribal knowledge into specific diagnostic workflows. By guiding AI Advisor’s reasoning and tool selection, Runbooks turn alerts into actionable, automated investigations, dramatically accelerating MTTR.
In this edition of Anatomy of an OTT Traffic Surge, we look at Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video. Based on traffic stats, TNF is the most watched program on the streaming service. Using Kentik’s OTT capabilities, we’ll see how this program gets delivered and how that has changed over 11 weeks of the NFL season.