Customers usually need more information to effectively use this solution. So, simplifying it could be an area of improvement.

Moreover, I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement. The product is expensive. It could be more cost-effective.

They've added a lot of features in the beta product that is coming out, things we told them about before. We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do.

They've been working on a cost calculator, which would be great for us, so we don't have to do it ourselves. 

This is all in the beta now. Those have been my main issues so far, and since we're not a super-large, global internet service provider, we probably use 20 percent of all the features, or even less. So there aren't any major issues that annoy me on a day-to-day basis. We're extremely happy and it seems like they're listening to whatever feedback we have given in the past.

I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that. The interface just wasn't working for me so I went back to V3 to do that stuff.

Also, with the alerting page, that traffic overview page, sometimes I really want to share it with someone. Usually, you can get a quick URL on most of the other pages to share that particular view, but I can't do that on the traffic overview page that is given to me from an alert. That would be really helpful.

I would like to see more granular user and security rights. Currently, a user can be a member or an administrator. I would like to limit what a user can see, be it IP or interface. I would like to be able to give my customers access to the data explorer with just their data.

Version 4 of the platform is good and going in the right direction. It's starting to answer questions before they're asked. The mindset to date has been, "Hey I've got a question. Let me go Kentik to get the answer." They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing.

There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly.

I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis.

Firstly, my Dashlane password manager attempts to fill in the dimensions field for me, so I just turn off my password manager when that occurs.

Secondly, sometimes its difficult to order the dimensions correctly when trying to make Sankey flow diagrams. It’d be nice if there was a knob somewhere in my users settings that allowed me to make the dimensions box a single column from top to bottom so I don’t have to spend extra time tying to drag a dimension into the correct column to get the order correctly.

The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it... I keep telling them, "Man, you need to find a way to make it actionable because if you could actually mitigate, it'd be huge what you guys could do."

The way things are, we have to have some sort of DDoS mitigation, like Arbor or something of that nature. Once the anomaly is detected, that's great, but then you have to mitigate. If Kentik had mitigation, or if they could acquire a solution and throw it onto their platform and have that portion available, that would be huge.

I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important.

The other area would be supplanting companies like SevOne and other companies that are really good in the NMS space, specifically for SNMP data.

The alerting ability is greatly improved. I think there is some movement still to make this into a 'dumb mode' vs 'expert mode'. There is the SQL-like syntax, but that is expert+.

Kentik has been remarkable at anticipating the design requirements of their customers. They have provided everything that I might want already. After using it for over six months constantly, I am still discovering new things.

The only times I’ve felt that “I wish I could use this to XYZ,” I’ve contacted support and it turns out that I can do that already. However, I just didn’t know if I could do it using the existing controls or via a combination of query types.

Perhaps a better explanation would be to see how tagging is captured and a method of comparing my tagged interfaces on Kentik’s side. Right now, I can go in and look at all of the interfaces that they’re receiving the flow for and also sort/filter it, but there is no way for me to easily compare them between my nodes. I need to add, though, that’s really not a missing feature of their product; it is just a way to help troubleshoot my own (potentially broken) systems.

I add the tags to my own devices, not them. However, if we’ve made a mistake on our side, it’s a basic row-by-row comparison. I believe there is a way to use their SQL query feature to pull a better comparison but a method of using the GUI would be nice.