Kentik Previous Solutions

SM
Marketing Manager at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We mainly used Arbor. And also, we worked with local vendors in Japan and China as well. Basically, when we work with customers, we choose the product based on their requirements.

Arbor required big appliances at that time, whereas Kentik was more advanced and software-based.

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PC
Interconnection Manager at a music company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We made the decision to go with Kentik instead of building something ourselves, and that was mainly due to the graphing features of the product, which are really excellent; the drill-down features. For us to develop something like that ourselves would have taken a lot of time.

It was in their very early days. We met Kentik at some conference and we thought, "Hey, this looks like a cool product and something that we probably need." So we started a trial and were very happy with the product and we continued using it. We really like that they understood our use case. The people who worked at Kentik back then were people who came from the same background as ours, with CDNs and content delivery.

We were extremely happy with the features; they were exactly what we were after. Back then, one big plus for us was not having to operate our own hardware, like appliances, in data centers. Since we're an internet company, we're not afraid of sending data to the cloud, a process which might concern a bank, for example. It was pretty much a no-brainer to continue using the product.

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JM
Director, Backbone Engineering at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We have DDoS mitigation providers but they don't really provide the analytics. They detect and mitigate, but they don't really provide you any information on what's really happening.

At my previous company we had tried, several times, to build our own solution, and I can tell you that it was not terribly successful. We could only ever get analytics on one very small use case, as opposed to all of the use cases that Kentik has. I was intimately involved with each one of those attempts, so I can tell you it was not easy.

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March 2024
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SW
Network Architect/Security Manager at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

We used multiple NetFlow products. Kentik shines with the ease of running reports and looking at data.

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AD
Director, Interconnection Strategy at GTT

We were using a homebrew solution previously, which was not NetFlow based; it was BTU-based, which was vendor-specific. We are, obviously, a multi-vendor shop, so it only gave us limited visibility.

We switched to have the ability to see much more than what we were seeing. Kentik was platform-independent. There was also the fact that compared to what they were offering, nothing else on the market had the same feature set. Kentik already had more, and that was three years ago. They have been innovators in the space and have continued to push on the available features since. And most important, for us, was the price point. It was highly competitively priced. It was a no-brainer.

We did look into the on-prem option. Within our group, we're just not set up to do that. We're not server guys. And the pricing on the as-a-service-solution was such that it still made sense to go that route for us.

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AH
Manager, Automation Tools at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We're also using a competitor, Druid, which is an open-source version that we host on-prem. So we're actually doing both cloud and on-prem solutions. At the moment we use each solution to verify the other.

We decided to bring in Kentik partially because of cost. Our particular instantiation of Druid is enormously expensive. The director of capacity management wanted to spin up Kentik, originally as a PoC, to see what kind of data we could get out of it for a lower price point. But then he quit, and we're still just going along with it. Eventually a decision will be made between them, but initially it was cost that pushed us toward Kentik, to see if we could get more bang for our buck.

A related difference between the two solutions is that with Kentik, and the infrastructure owned by someone else since it's a SaaS solution, the overhead on our side is much lower. We're also not necessarily on the hook for dedicated infrastructure costs. So, the price is amazing.

With Druid, for every node that's recording all of this data that goes across the routers and such, there are no limits. With Kentik, occasionally, we'll drop data or we'll get a spike in the traffic that will make the data unreliable. That does not happen in Druid because it's not metered the same way.

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AW
Principal Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

The previous tool we used was an internal module we developed. The previous solution was very sales-driven. It wasn't very good and it was not our main expertise. We had a programmer-and-a-half doing it. There were two parts of the problem. One part was data ingest at our scale. How do you ingest this much stuff? And the second was how do you visualize it? Those are both hard problems that are different from one another. Our skill set is not really that good in either one. It was easier and made more sense to outsource those aspects to people who do know how to do that.

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it_user585876 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees

We did trials on a few competitor solutions. They were too slow, too complex, and required lots of on-premises touches to fix their equipment. They crashed often and they had poor customer service.

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JN
Sr. Network Manager at Netskope

Coming into this company, I felt they were flying blind, meaning they didn't really have anything from a monitoring standpoint. They didn't understand how decisions were made. And to make educated decisions, you actually have to have the proper tools in place. Kentik was a tool that I know works really well.

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it_user591852 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We used in-house, hand-built things. All based on binary RRDs or worse.

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it_user607401 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Security Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have used SolarWinds in another company. You get a very simple, non-configurable type of view with green, yellow, red and ingress/egress numbers. It doesn’t compare to the analytical capabilities that Kentik has.

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Buyer's Guide
Network Monitoring Software
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Kentik, Cisco, SolarWinds and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.