EdgeUno Delivers Leading Internet Services in Latin America with Network Observability from Kentik

Overview

EdgeUno provides businesses with telecommunications, internet, edge-managed and professional services in the emerging economies of Latin America. To ensure that its customers receive the highest quality services while optimizing connectivity, costs and operational efficiencies across its network infrastructures, EdgeUno uses network observability from Kentik.

Situation

EdgeUno was founded with a central focus: to improve the availability and quality of internet services in countries with emerging economies. Today, the company serves businesses and telecommunication providers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru. With 20 points of presence (PoPs) and more than 2,500 internetwork connections, EdgeUno offers a broad range of services — including data-center construction and management, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), cloud access, colocation and dark fiber — delivered with professional services tailored to the needs of each customer. “Our goal is to take our expertise and skills and craft a solution to the specific needs of each customer,” says Nathalia Fontenelle, marketing manager for EdgeUno.

Most customers fall into two general categories: Latin American businesses that want to strengthen their internet-based offerings; and U.S. and E.U. companies that want to distribute their content in Latin America. “If you stream content or look at social media in Latin America, you’re probably using the EdgeUno network,” Fontenelle notes.

To deliver on its promises to customers, the network management team at EdgeUno’s headquarters in Bogotá, Colombia constantly monitors operations to ensure peak performance and availability. “Our clients have many options. They choose us because we offer the best quality of service, the best monitoring and the highest reliability,” notes Marco Cabral, manager of EdgeUno’s network operations center (NOC).

Solution

Early in the process of building out its network, EdgeUno’s founders wanted the best solution for monitoring network operations and ensuring maximum reliability. “They chose Kentik because it was the leader in the market and the best platform available,” observes Fabricio Feijo, interconnection manager for the company. “I used the Kentik platform at my last company before joining EdgeUno, and I know it is best in class.”

Data-driven Peering

The EdgeUno team uses Kentik for a variety of functions. A primary use case is collecting data to improve peering arrangements with other carriers. Peering agreements are an essential element in the business, as they can improve service to customers through higher performance as well as lower costs for EdgeUno. But to achieve these goals, peering arrangements must be carefully researched and negotiated, and that involves understanding critical details. This includes the amount of network traffic transferred to and from specific customers, the location(s) of key customers, and the nature of the traffic being moved. Kentik helps in all respects.

“The level of detail provided by Kentik is very useful. I use Data Explorer (Kentik’s primary user interface) a lot,” Feijo says. “When I talk with current or potential peering partners, I like to show them data from Kentik, so I create a lot of dashboards showing traffic volumes and network performance. I can even create my own filters to produce exactly the data I want to present. Kentik makes it so easy, it’s almost like playing a game.”

Capacity Planning

Data provided by Kentik is also used for capacity planning at EdgeUno. For example, EdgeUno can pinpoint where bandwidth use is highest, which can help inform decisions like where to build new PoPs and data centers to ensure its solutions are tailored closest to users for the best experience. The Kentik platform also helps EdgeUno monitor traffic volume across its interconnections and gain AI-driven insights to understand traffic trends. With this information, EdgeUno can provision adequate capacity to avoid performance degradation and maintain service levels as traffic volumes increase.

Availability and Performance

Kentik also plays a vital role in maintaining the highest level of quality and availability for EdgeUno’s services. “For some clients, we are their entry point into and throughout Latin America,” Cabral says. “So even if a single device malfunctions, the impact could be regional, which is why Kentik is mission critical for our business and our customers’ businesses.”

“With Kentik, we can detect issues, performance degradation and bandwidth requirements before they become problems,” adds Cabral. “Kentik helps us guarantee the best digital experience for our customers.”

Fast, Actionable Network Observability

Kentik is key to delivering on EdgeUno’s commitment to a quality customer experience, with excellence in three aspects of network observability: breadth of data collected, speed and ease of use.

“I always knew that traffic-monitoring data was important, but I never imagined that it would be available the way Kentik presents it,” Cabral says. “I can see all the significant changes as they happen and with detailed insights which helps us to address them quickly.”

Cabral adds, “The best thing about Kentik is how fast I can find the data. At previous companies, I saw many tools that took a long time to send an alarm or a report, not to mention the time required to run a report over historical data. But with Kentik, I can see the whole network with all the traffic. Or, I can drill down and get detailed information about a specific customer data or network connection. Whatever I need, I get it easily and quickly.”

Results

Cost Optimization

Using Kentik, EdgeUno can make well-informed decisions about peering. As a result of establishing better peering relationships for traffic, EdgeUno can boost network performance (e.g., through lower latencies) and save money doing so.

MTTR Reduction

AI-driven insights and alerts generated by Kentik reduce time to resolution of problems — and even prevent problems in the first place — by providing detailed, real-time information about a network event. “Using Kentik, we have created scenarios where we can see, for example, that if a company has BGP leaks caused by route advertisement misconfigurations or even hijacking, we can see where and how it could affect other clients. This enables us to head off any problems. That’s very valuable for us in the NOC, as it saves us time and ensures there’s no disruption in the quality of experience for our clients.”

Cabral adds: “I’ve never seen any tool like Kentik in terms of the ease of accessing data. We can see data in real-time, and that makes our response quicker and more effective.”

Faster Response Times with Cross-team Collaboration

Kentik contributes to efficient and responsive NOC procedures for EdgeUno. One ease-of-use feature in Kentik allows any team member to send a link to someone else in the organization with all the information about an ongoing incident. For example, if an issue needs to be raised from Tier 1 response to Tier 2, all the first-line agent needs to do is send the Kentik link to a Tier 2 representative and that person will instantly have all the background and details. “In the past, we would have to send screenshots or forward all the raw data,” Cabral notes. “With Kentik, everyone can see the same data at the same time.”

Key Takeaways

The Kentik solution positively impacts EdgeUno and its customers in three ways.

First, it greatly improves the visibility that network managers have into its multinational network. Kentik collects all telemetry about all networks and enriches them with context, including custom dimensions unique to customers. This allows EdgeUno to see all aspects of traffic flows, internet routing, performance tests, devices metrics, geo-location and more.

Second, EdgeUno’s day-to-day network operations are more efficient and cost-effective. The data provided by Kentik helps the company determine the best infrastructure to build, peering contracts to negotiate and operational procedures to follow.

Finally, and most importantly, the customer experience is enhanced. This is the result of decisions, driven by Kentik data, that 1) improve network performance, 2) ensure optimal availability, 3) enable the ability to drill into potential issues fast, and 4) keep operating costs as low as possible.

“The quality of our services is our most critical asset, so we need the broadest and best approach possible to monitoring performance. Kentik provides exactly that,” Cabral summarizes.