Plan Network Capacity with Confidence at Scale

Kentik’s Capacity Planning workflow automates bandwidth forecasting by analyzing SNMP interface metrics and historical traffic to compute both utilization and runout for any group of links. Instead of spreadsheet gymnastics, you get daily forecasts and automatic runout projections that show when specific links are likely to saturate. From there you can prioritize upgrades based on which interfaces will run out of capacity first and how critical they are to your business.

To right-size transit and IX capacity, Kentik lets you treat each interconnect and IX port as a capacity-planning object: it tracks current utilization, peak traffic, and long-term trends, then projects when those links will hit critical thresholds. By combining this with Kentik’s interconnect and cost analytics, you can decide when to upgrade specific transit or IX ports — and where peering or traffic engineering can offload traffic instead of blindly over-provisioning.

Effective capacity planning requires a combination of interface-level metrics (utilization, error rates, discards from SNMP and streaming telemetry), flow-level metrics (traffic volume by application, source, destination, and AS path), and trend data (growth rates, seasonality, peak-to-average ratios). Kentik unifies these data sources in one platform — correlating SNMP interface metrics with NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX flow data and BGP routing context — so capacity decisions can be made on the full picture rather than on partial information. For deeper context on the underlying telemetry, see Network Performance Monitoring on Kentipedia.

Detecting saturation before it causes user-visible congestion requires watching utilization trends continuously and alerting on the patterns that historically precede congestion — not just on simple percent-full thresholds. Kentik supports this with dynamic baselines that learn normal utilization patterns per link and per time-of-day, configurable thresholds that account for short-term bursts versus sustained growth, and automated alerts that fire when a link is on a trajectory to saturate within a defined window. Teams use this to upgrade or rebalance traffic days or weeks before congestion would otherwise force emergency action.

Hybrid cloud capacity forecasting requires visibility into traffic across data centers, cloud regions, and the connections between them — not just on individual links. Kentik ingests flow data from on-premises infrastructure (NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX) and from major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) into a unified platform, then applies the same forecasting and runout projections across every environment. This makes it possible to anticipate capacity needs on Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, Cloud Interconnect, and FastConnect circuits alongside on-premises WAN links, and to plan capacity in the context of how cloud and on-premises traffic interact.

Network baselining captures what “normal” looks like for each interface, application, and traffic flow over time — so deviations stand out clearly when they occur. Kentik automatically generates baselines from historical flow and metric data, then surfaces deviations that may indicate capacity issues (sudden bandwidth growth, unusual application traffic patterns, unexpected traffic from new sources) before they impact users. Combined with dynamic thresholds, this approach reduces alert fatigue compared to static percent-full thresholds and catches anomalies that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Major events — sporting broadcasts, product launches, software updates, news cycles — produce traffic patterns that don’t fit normal forecasting models, and the ability to anticipate and respond in real time matters more than long-term projections. Kentik supports this with real-time traffic visibility across all interfaces and providers, historical comparisons to similar events, automated alerting on sudden traffic shifts, and the ability to identify which applications, customers, or destinations are driving the surge. Service providers and large enterprises use this combination to make in-event decisions — for example, shifting traffic between providers or rebalancing peering — to prevent saturation before it affects users.

Service provider capacity planning involves orders of magnitude more interfaces, traffic, and customer-specific context than enterprise capacity planning — and the analytics platform has to keep up. Kentik scales to ingest flow data from large backbone networks, peering edges, and customer interconnects, then applies forecasting and runout projections across all of it. Multi-tenant analytics let provider teams plan capacity for specific customers, services, or geographies; peering and transit analytics inform interconnection strategy alongside capacity decisions. For more on Kentik’s service provider capabilities, see Kentik for Service Providers.