Kentik Blog

Earlier this year the folks over at RouterFreak did a very thorough review of Kentik Detect. We really respected their thoroughness and the fact that they are practicing network engineers, so as we’ve come up with cool new gizmos in our product, we’ve asked them to extend their review. This post highlights some excerpts from their latest review, with particular focus on Kentik NPM, our enhanced network performance monitoring solution.

Avi Freedman recently spoke with Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro of PacketPushers about Kentik’s latest updates, which focus primarily on features that enhance network performance monitoring and DDoS protection. This post includes excerpts from that conversation as well as a link to the full podcast. Avi discusses his vision of appliance-free network monitoring, explains how host monitoring expands Kentik’s functionality, and gives an overview of how we detect and respond to anomalies and attacks.

Kentik’s recent recognition as an IDC Innovator for Cloud-Based Network Monitoring was based not only on our orientation as a cloud-based SaaS but also on the deep capabilities of Kentik Detect. In this post we look at how our purpose-built distributed architecture enables us to keep up with raw network traffic data while providing a unified network intelligence solution, including traffic analysis, performance monitoring, Internet peering, and DDoS protection.

Every so often a fundamental shift in technology sets off a culture war in the world of IT. Two decades ago, with the advent of a commercial Internet, it was a struggle between the Bellheads and the Netheads. Today, Netheads have become the establishment and cloud computing advocates are pushing to upend the status quo. In this first post of a 3-part series, analyst Jim Metzler looks at how this dynamic is playing out in IT organizations.

“NetFlow” may be the most common short-hand term for network flow data, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only important flow protocol. In fact there are three primary flavors of flow data — NetFlow, sFlow, and IPFIX — as well as a variety of brand-specific names used by various networking vendors. To help clear up any confusion, this post looks at the main flow-data protocols supported by Kentik Detect.

How does Kentik NPM help you track down network performance issues? In this post by Jim Meehan, Director of Solutions Engineering, we look at how we recently used our own NPM solution to determine if a spike in retransmits was due to network issues or a software update we’d made on our application servers. You’ll see how we ruled out the software update, and were then able to narrow the source of the issue to a specific route using BGP AS Path.

Destination-based Remotely Triggered Black-Hole routing (RTBH) is an incredibly effective and very cost-effective method of protecting your network during a DDoS attack. And with Kentik’s advanced Alerting system, automated RTBH is also relatively simple to configure. In this post, Kentik Customer Success Engineer Dan Rohan guides us through the process step by step.

As organizations increasingly rely on digital operations there’s no end in sight to the DDoS epidemic. That aggravates the headaches for service providers, who stand between attackers and their targets, but it also creates the opportunity to offer effective protection services. Done right, these services can deepen customer relationships while expanding revenue and profits. But to succeed, providers will need to embrace big data as a key element of DDoS protection.

The source of DDoS attacks is typically depicted as a hoodie-wearing amateur. But the more serious threat is actually a well-developed marketplace for exploits, with vendors whose state-of-the-art technology can easily overwhelm legacy detection systems. In this post we look why you need the firepower of big data to fend off this new breed of commercial attackers.