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One platform for flow, metrics, devices, cloud, and synthetics
The network intelligence leader
AI that deeply understands your network and advises how to design, operate, and protect infrastructure at scale
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Why modern network teams choose Kentik vs SolarWinds
Kentik: Modern Network Intelligence Platform | SolarWinds: Legacy NPM Tools | |
|---|---|---|
Unified visibility | Kentik seamlessly unifies all network telemetry—flow, SNMP, cloud & synthetics—into one platform for a comprehensive view of network health. | SolarWinds is a modular suite where NPM, NTA, and related features are split across products and workflows—even when surfaced in one console. |
AI/ML capabilities | Empowers NetOps teams with powerful AI capabilities: natural language queries, automated cause analysis, and agentic investigations. Proactively identifies issues for faster MTTR. | AI and ML features are mostly rules-based and AIOps event correlation. SolarWinds does not offer natural language queries or agentic investigation tools. |
Cloud and hybrid coverage | Provides deep, native visibility into hybrid- and multicloud networks—including AWS, Azure, and GCP—providing a clear view of VPC flow traffic, cloud paths, and SaaS performance. | Legacy NPM solution designed and built for on-premises network infrastructure monitoring. Cloud visibility is secondary and built for cloud traffic analytics. |
Flow analytics | Ingests unsampled flow data at line-rate with BGP, host, and business tag enrichment. Kentik empowers NetOps teams with a powerful query engine and intuitive visualizations such as Sankey diagrams. | SolarWinds NTA provides strong reporting, but lacks advanced functions for deep, ad-hoc flow exploration. Flow analysis can be slow in large-scale deployments. |
Metrics collection | Offers a highly scalable and forward-looking approach that collects both traditional network performance metrics and modern gNMI streaming telemetry for real-time, high-fidelity insights. | Does not support streaming telemetry. Remote polling is performed via platform polling engines. Scaling typically requires deploying additional polling engines and increasing database capacity. |
Cost and capacity planning | Combines detailed traffic trends with actual cost data, enabling data-driven capacity planning and network cost optimization decisions. | Provides basic reporting on utilization trends and forecasting for network nodes and interfaces. Does not provide cost-aware transit and peering planning features. |
Deployment and maintenance | Delivered as a fully-managed SaaS platform, Kentik frees teams to focus on strategic network initiatives. No need to deploy, maintain, or upgrade servers or storage. | Complex setup and maintenance requiring customer-managed servers, databases, polling engines, licenses, and other components. Upgrades, scaling, and maintenance are the customer’s responsibility. |
Speed and scalability | Kentik uses a highly efficient SaaS data engine that delivers lightning-fast query performance and scales effortlessly to handle any amount of data. | The performance and scalability of SolarWinds modules depend heavily on SQL/database sizing and the number of polling engines in use. |
Licensing and TCO | Kentik’s transparent and predictable SaaS licensing model means no hidden hardware or maintenance fees, and ensures clear and manageable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). | SolarWinds requires per-module license fees, plus infrastructure costs. TCO grows as deployments scale, requiring additional polling engines and database capacity. Customers report dramatic price increases after 2025 private equity acquisition. |
What customers say
“Kentik saved us time and gave us full confidence that we’d be aware of and be able to respond to any cloud or on-prem network issues on a timely basis.”
– Louis Bolanos, Staff Cloud Network Engineer
“We use Kentik to continually improve our network at ServiceNow.”
– Davin Camara, VP, Cloud Network Services
“Kentik allows us to better understand DDoS attacks and investigate security events.”
– Miguel Benjumea Ortiz, Network Administrator
“Previously, we didn’t have anywhere near the granularity of data we have with Kentik.”
– Jurriën Rasing, Group Product Manager for Platform Engineering
Kentik is the network intelligence platform for modern infrastructure teams.
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