Today, we only have 12 devices. We're probably not even close to reaching any limits. I would guess if we had thousands of them it might be a different story.

In terms of expanding our usage, we should probably look at the cloud part of the product. The DDoS part might be interesting as well. It's something that we haven't had time to really dig into. It's there and it's free, so why not? But then, our network setup is fairly simple. We don't operate any global backbones or the like. That's why we don't use some of its features. And we're not an internet service provider, so we don't need to understand a million things about what our users are doing.

At my previous company we probably had one of the largest installations ever. I would say Kentik is fairly scalable. That company is one of the biggest ISPs in the world. They had 200,000 netflow flows per second. So it's pretty scalable. The scale I'm dealing with now is so minimal in comparison. It's a different world.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Using it as a service, it scales indefinitely for our use purposes. That's why we did the as-a-service solution. Scaling is their problem. We didn't want to worry about it. From our vantage point, it scales to infinity.

All in, there are between 30 to 40 people who use it on a regular basis. We certainly have more users in the system than that, but there are 30 to 40 at a given time. They are mainly our engineering which includes the peering guys, myself and my team, and our core backbone guys who handle mostly long-haul stuff. Within our NOC for troubleshooting, there are a number of people who use it. And we've created some custom dashboards for our sales and sales engineering folks. Those dashboards make data easy for them to digest. They can go in via a nice, pretty portal. They type in a network they might be interested in and then all the data that they could possibly want, in an easily digestible format, is right in their faces.

We definitely have plans to increase usage. We'd like to get it into the hands of more of our salespeople. Only a small fraction of them are currently using it, mainly the guys in the carrier space. I'd love to get it into the hands of our enterprise people as well. But there are limitations on our side, including available cycles to get our guys up to speed on that kind of thing. The other thing we've also looked at doing is potentially opening it up to our customers and giving them a view into their traffic. We haven't gotten there yet, but those are things we've looked into and are looking into.

So far we've been able to more than double and triple our use cases for it and it hasn't really even hiccupped. The scalability seems good.

We have data centers all around the world and Kentik is in every data center. We plan to build many more, and it's going to be included into each of those builds. We're using it globally and expect to keep growing its use.

The scalability is great. We've had no issues with it. Our network is very large.

Obviously, you want to be a little — I don't know say cautious — but a little aware of what you're doing. It's the same thing as when you use a database. If you run a query: "Show me all zip codes starting with two," you're going to get a huge number. What you really meant is, "Show me all the zip codes starting in two in Maryland." That's a very different query and that will get you a much faster response because you're already only looking in Maryland. Without having someone to help guide you through that process and who knows what a database does, it's very easy to write bad queries.

One of the great things about this product is that it takes away that "middleman," that developer between the user of the tool and the raw database. At many companies, you have the database of customer information, for example. Then you have the users of that data who need it to make tickets and resolve issues. And in between them, there's a developer who figures out what the customer service people need to know: "Oh, you need to know all tickets of this customer in the past week." Or, "You need to know all the tickets that are open right now." The developer pre-writes those queries for them so they don't have to do it. What Kentik does is it eliminates that layer. I can slice data any way I want on the platform. But with that comes the caution that, if I write a query that is stupid, it's going to take a long time. There are ways to write queries which are smart and ways to write queries which are stupid. That's where it does take a little bit of time to understand how it works. Once I know how to do it, I can easily help other people make dashboard queries so that they don't need to know that.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. Kentik allows us to set sampling of flows on a per device basis.

So far, Kentik has scaled for what we've done with it and we haven't hit any scale issues to date. I don't know if we're a very large user compared to some of their other customers so I don't know if we're a good example to discuss scale, per se. But we haven't encountered any scale issues from our side.

We don't have plans to expand the use of Kentik, other than increasing licenses to gather flow data for more devices. We buy per license and we have 75 or 100 licenses. The size of the teams that use it is 100 people or so. They are security engineers, network engineers, network health analysts, and threat-intelligence folks.

I have not had any scalability issues.

We have not scaled the product past the current level we are at. However, I don’t see that could ever be an issue. You just send them the flow from your devices.

If you’re scaling, you make sure your interfaces are sending the data and you're golden.