Kentik Blog
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.
AI has quickly become part of the language of network observability. Many vendors across the observability landscape can describe, summarize, correlate, or explain some data or situation, leveraging basic LLM capabilities. At a distance, many of these offerings sound similar. They promise faster insight, efficient operations, and a more intelligent path through rising complexity. But the industry has reached a point where surface-level similarity is creating noise, not value. As agentic systems become more common, the industry needs a better definition of a quality solution to cut through the noise.
Internet analyst Doug Madory examines Iran’s ongoing internet blackout, now one of the largest government-directed communication shutdowns in history, and shows how limited connectivity is being selectively restored for a privileged few.
Many BGP route leaks reported by automated detection systems are actually brief, low-impact artifacts of normal BGP convergence. Doug Madory examines examples from Cloudflare Radar, Routeviews, and Jared Mauch’s long-running leak detector to show how these “ephemeral leaks” arise, why they usually don’t disrupt traffic, and why they still matter for routing security.
Over the past few months, we’ve been making the Kentik platform easier to use and more actionable, with AI increasingly at the center of how teams interact with it. AI Advisor sits near the middle of a lot of that progress, but this is not only an AI story. It’s also about Kentik becoming a more complete platform, bringing flow and NMS together in more useful ways, helping teams reduce network costs with sharper visibility, and making it easier to find the right workflows and get from question to answer faster.
In this post, we use Kentik’s traffic statistics to dig into the ongoing internet shutdown in Iran, which began within hours of American and Israeli airstrikes on February 28. This is the second shutdown of the year for Iran and its worst in history. Despite the shutdown, a small amount of whitelisted traffic continues to flow in and out of the country. Using our unique traffic data, we visualize changes within this residual traffic in recent days as the government cracks down on Iranians sharing access to these precious holes in the digital blindfold.
As cyberattacks evolve into “machine-speed” disruption campaigns that span cloud, identity, and network planes, traditional monitoring is no longer enough to protect modern enterprise infrastructure. Shifting to a network intelligence model, powered by real-time telemetry and AI-driven reasoning, enables security teams to detect weak signals and automate defenses before an incident becomes systemic.
Courtney Boisseree, our Senior Director of People and Places, is celebrating her 10-year anniversary as a cornerstone of Kentik’s culture. From the early days as an “HR team of one,” she has championed our “Be You” mentality and instilled Kentikan values into the company’s DNA.
Kentik’s AI Advisor acts as a virtual network engineer, helping teams of all skill levels troubleshoot, manage, and optimize their infrastructure with unprecedented speed and context. We explore seven practical NetOps use cases, from rapid incident triage and capacity planning to upcoming live-device command support, that demonstrate how using AI as a collaborative teammate dramatically reduces manual investigative work.