For years, many network teams have relied on tools that feel… familiar. Perhaps too familiar. If you’ve been in the trenches with solutions like SolarWinds NPM or NTA, you know the routine: separate modules, disparate experiences, manual context-switching, and that nagging feeling that your tools aren’t quite keeping pace with your evolving network.
The truth is, modern networks demand a modern approach. The days of treating flow and metrics as separate entities, struggling with limited cloud visibility, and investing resources in on-premises upkeep are behind us. The network has changed dramatically; shouldn’t your monitoring tool evolve too?
Let’s explore why it’s time to rethink your network monitoring strategy and consider a path forward that aligns with today’s complex, hybrid IT infrastructure.
The challenge of disparate tools in a unified world
One of the biggest frustrations with legacy systems is the fragmented experience. Even legacy “platforms” like SolarWinds are in practice just individual tool modules integrated with each other and a shared web portal. Correlating flow and metrics data often means jumping between views, re-querying, and manually stitching together insights. This creates a mental overhead, forcing you to constantly switch context just to piece together a complete picture of an issue. It creates operational overhead when trying to maintain it, and a nightmare when trying to scale. Anyone got a spare server lying around?
Imagine a world where all the data needed to design, operate, and protect your networks – flow, SNMP, traps, syslog, cloud logs, synthetics, and more – lives in a single, unified platform with a consistent, highly enriched, scalable data model. This isn’t a pipe dream; it’s the foundation of modern network intelligence. A unified approach eliminates manual data merging and accelerates investigations, enabling you to transition from insight to action with unprecedented efficiency. It makes it easy to see when a device is at 95% CPU, quickly identifying which app is driving the traffic, which app it belongs to, and where it’s going.
Navigating the cloud: Visibility gaps are no longer acceptable
Your business isn’t entirely on-prem anymore, so why should your monitoring be? Many legacy solutions offer, at best, limited visibility into select cloud gateways. This leaves gaping blind spots in your AWS, Azure, or GCP VPC environments, making it nearly impossible to understand cloud paths or implement effective SaaS synthetics.
Modern network intelligence provides native, deep visibility into public cloud environments. This involves understanding traffic patterns within your VPCs, tracking application performance across cloud boundaries, and ensuring consistent service delivery, regardless of where your infrastructure is located.
Flow data: From basic stats to actionable insights
Flow data has been around for a long time, but aging tools often struggle to unlock its full potential. In fact, this is something we hear from customers all the time – they have a flow solution but don’t use it or see much value in it. That’s an issue with the tool. Not the data.
Legacy NetFlow tools like SolarWinds NTA often limited you to simple analysis – like top talkers, basic context, and quickly buckled at large scale. They were made for reporting and basic planning.
These legacy NetFlow tools were built for reporting, not designing. Limited development in products like SolarWinds NTA means you’re often stuck with basic top talker reports, lacking crucial visualizations like Sankey diagrams that reveal complex traffic patterns. Performance issues at scale are also a common complaint, especially with unsampled data.
A truly powerful flow solution offers rich, unsampled flow data at line-rate, enhanced with BGP and host enrichment. It offers a more modern, user-friendly visualization of complex traffic patterns like multi-stage Sankey diagrams. The capabilities transform raw logs into context-rich records, allowing you to use a powerful query engine to pinpoint issues, visualize traffic flows effortlessly, and make data-driven decisions.
Network monitoring metrics: Beyond the traditional
While SNMP, SNMP traps, and Syslog are still vital, they represent only part of the telemetry story. Legacy systems often rely solely on these traditional collections, struggling under higher polling rates and requiring significant horizontal resource build-out to scale. This leads to increased costs and complexity.
The future of metrics includes a highly scalable collection that supports cutting-edge gNMI streaming telemetry. This enables real-time, high-fidelity data collection without performance degradation or the need for constant hardware additions, providing a forward-looking view of your network health.
AI/ML: The new frontier of network operations
In today’s complex networks, manual investigations often serve as a bottleneck. Many traditional tools completely lack AI capabilities, leaving engineers to sift through mountains of data to find root causes.
Kentik AI tools, such as Cause Analysis and natural language investigations, are game changers. They make complex network investigations fast, intuitive, and low-friction, helping you predict issues, identify anomalies, and significantly reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Capacity and cost planning: Insights that impact the bottom line
Understanding traffic trends is good; linking them directly to your budget is better. Manual report exports and data merging from separate NPM and NTA modules make effective capacity and cost planning a tedious, error-prone exercise.
Imagine combining detailed traffic and interface trends with your actual cost data. This provides powerful, integrated capacity and cost insights, enabling smarter routing decisions, optimizing peering agreements, and ultimately boosting your profitability.
Overhead: The hidden cost of legacy network monitoring tools
The operational and financial overhead of legacy, on-premise monitoring tools is a silent drain on resources. Maintaining multiple servers, polling engines, and databases – each with its own licenses, updates, and maintenance cycles – consumes valuable capital and even more valuable time. Then there’s the financial unpredictability: modular licenses, maintenance fees, and hardware expansions that quietly inflate your cost of owning and running the solution.
Modern, fully SaaS platforms like Kentik eliminate that burden entirely. No servers to patch, no surprise hardware costs, no complex or additional licensing requirements. Just transparent, predictable pricing and seamless scalability. This eliminates hidden hardware costs and provides predictable spending, allowing you to budget confidently and demonstrate clear ROI.
Modern networks demand more than just monitoring. They require a platform that connects design, operation, and protection in one continuous network intelligence loop.
Kentik unifies flow, infrastructure performance, status, and metrics, cloud traffic, synthetics, and AI-driven insights – so you can plan capacity, troubleshoot faster, and prevent incidents before they happen. Plus, we do it with a modern, cloud-native solution that means no servers to maintain, no tool sprawl, and with transparent pricing. Giving Kentik NMS a try isn’t just network intelligence – it’s intelligent decision making.