I worked with Kentik directly and I had a very good experience with them. They were knowledgeable, helpful, and easy to work with. They used Slack and it was very easy for us to communicate with them, even across teams. They were working with our IT team and the backbone engineering team. It was very easy.

We did not work with a third-party. You absolutely do not need that. This is not like HP OpenView or a Salesforce, where you need people who know the system to get going. The API is very easy to use. There's not a ton of Salesforce-level business logic in it.

Basically, it's a NetFlow collector, ingester, database, and a UI front-end to make reports. While it depends on how much in-house capability you have, most people should be able to do this without a problem.