Traffic Costs

One of the most important and fundamental questions network teams need to be able to answer is, how much does it cost us to transport traffic to or from another network? It's a critical question for optimizing spend improving performance and protecting margins but actually getting that cost visibility has historically not been easy you've had to manually stitch together three different data sources SNMP volumetric data to see how much traffic is going across your interfaces, contract data to know what you're paying your upstream providers per megabit per second, and flow data to understand what traffic from which networks, applications, OTTs, or CDNs is going over those links. Kentik is the first platform to bring all of that together with our new automated traffic costs workflow. It gives you instant cost estimates for key slices of network traffic, so network, financial operations, and commercial teams can take action to cut costs, boost revenue, and run more efficiently. Let's take a look. Use case number one, costs by AS group. In our first use case, I want to understand how much it's costing our network to receive traffic from all Google ASNs. That insight could help me decide whether to reengineer traffic or even peer directly to lower costs and improve performance. With just a few clicks, traffic cost shows me the total estimated cost for the month, the effective cost per megabit per second, and how much traffic came in and went out for this specific traffic slice. The Sankey diagram shows me how this traffic flowed. Just toggle between ingress and egress to see the paths. Below, the table breaks down each path contributing to the total cost. I can see which device and interface the traffic traversed, what connectivity type it came from, was it transit, paid or free peering, customer connections, etcetera, which provider was used, the cost group and rate associated with each interface, and how much traffic moved across each one. On the right hand side, I get a cost breakdown for each path with a grand total at the bottom. Kentic automatically accounts for your billing direction, so only relevant traffic is included in the calculation. If an interface is missing a cost group or is mapped to multiple, Kentic flags that for you to fix. From here, I can quickly spot high cost paths and start investigating ways to optimize, whether that's shifting traffic to existing links or exploring other interconnection options. And if I wanna track this over time, easy. I can save the query as a snapshot and set up monthly automated snapshots to monitor cost trends for this traffic slice. Use case number two, costs by downstream customer. In this example, I'm a tier two transit provider, and I wanna show how much it's costing me to deliver traffic to a particular downstream customer. I'll select the customer from the customer port drop down and instantly see how much their traffic has cost me in upstream expenses for the month. This is powerful info especially when tracked over time because it tells me how healthy my margins are, how much am I earning from this customer versus what I'm spending to deliver their traffic. Commercial teams can use this data when it's time to renew contracts or negotiate pricing, helping them decide just how much they can discount without hurting ROI. And that's a quick look at traffic costs in Kentik. It's all about turning network data into real, actionable cost insights, so you can optimize performance, reduce spend, and make data-backed decisions. Thanks for watching. We hope this demo has been helpful. For more information, please visit our documentation or reach out to our support team.