Kentik Launches Open-source Network Observability Initiative for Developers

Kentik Labs will democratize network data to keep infrastructure running

SAN FRANCISCO – Aug. 19, 2021 – Kentik®, the network observability company, today announced Kentik Labs, a hub for the developer, DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) community. Kentik Labs launches with five open-source projects and a focus on democratizing network data to support the community in finding and fixing issues across any infrastructure.

Developer and IT teams face a number of complexities when it comes to understanding the health and performance of applications distributed across clouds and data centers. When a failure occurs, these teams scramble to investigate whether the issue is due to code, the infrastructure or something else. Kentik Labs will help developers and IT professionals reduce their mean time to recovery (MTTR), or the amount of time it takes to recover when a problem occurs, by providing open-source network observability tools to quickly rule the network in or out as the issue.

“Whether the problem is the application or the network, Kentik Labs offers tools to focus your efforts at the right layer with the right team,” said Ian Pye, co-founder and chief scientist of Kentik and co-chair of Kentik Labs. “In addition, branching out into open-source technology will allow us to participate in adjacent communities and define the future of observability.”

Kentik Labs launches with five open-source projects:

• kTranslate: A system for pulling and pushing network data and the basis of the integration with New Relic
• NetDiag: Scalable, asynchronous implementations of low-level network diagnostics
• Convis: Example code showing how to use eBPF to attribute process and container information to network traffic; learn more about this project in Pye’s recent talk at the eBPF Summit 2021
• kProbe: A high-performance host and sensor network probe (PCAP)
• Grafana App: A real-time internet-scale ingest and querying of network data

“Cloud and containers are pushing applications to be distributed by default. This means the network is a critical component in building anything,” said Nick Stinemates, vice president of business development at Kentik and co-chair of Kentik Labs. “With the launch of Kentik Labs, we’ll be exploring how to best integrate these concepts with the tools our users and customers are using today.”

To learn more about Kentik Labs, join Kentik on Slack or visit kentiklabs.com.