Kentik Valuable Features

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

The flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility. Also, the ability to monitor network performance is the most valuable feature.

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

For us, it's valuable to get a general understanding of how we serve different networks on the internet from our CDN. We're extremely happy with the different classifications you can make and also the ease of drilling down. It's a very easy tool to use. You only need 10 minutes and you pretty much have the hang of it, and that's really good.

We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up.

It also detects anomalies proactively, but the same is not so true when it comes to real network problems, since they tend to just happen. Sometimes we can see performance degrading over time or we can see traffic drops where we're not expecting them and that could be a problem, but it's not very proactive in that case. But it's pretty good. In fairly real-time we get alerts and can act on them.

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

The analytics part is really important for me. I have seen some things pop up periodically that I did not expect, so it is important for me to dig into them. The ability for me to look at the traffic and see where it's going to is extremely important. 

I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful.

And I'm really liking the alerting. It's super-helpful.

In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place. Data visualization is extremely important.

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

Kentik is a mature software product and is provided as SaaS. This is very valuable to me, because I don’t have to maintain a server, worry about resources, updates to software or OS, hard-drive space, or backups. I can just use Kentik to get the data in the format I want, such as reports or ad-hoc information.

Good NetFlow visualization and analysis tools are valuable to anybody who needs to understand the traffic that flows in and out the network.

This solution helps with planning, security, and troubleshooting. Kentik’s data explorer allows easy access to all data, grouped by any variable. You can do a quick overview of the top ten users or peer performance with very little effort.

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AD
Director, Interconnection Strategy at GTT

The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that. Prior to having Kentik we were totally blind to that level of detail.

We haven't seen anything else that comes even close to Kentik's real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, and we've demo'ed everything under the sun. We're fans.

We also use it to ingest metrics, log data at scale and business context information, for network analytics, primarily around traffic profitability analysis. For that purpose, it works pretty well. We're able to get traffic statistics, in an adjustable way, out of Kentik and then we marry them with our financials. Bing, bang, boom, we know what our traffic actually costs us.

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

The queries, in general, are great, being able to add tagging to the flows. 

Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools. I'm the manager of automation at our company, so for me, that's the big winner.

We're using the dashboard, but that's not as high-priority a use case for us.

We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution. That's one of the points in its favor.

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

Having the access to the flow. It gives me the ultimate exit type of stuff, which I wouldn't get in a basic flow-analysis engine. Also, I am able to do a lot of work on the visualization end to create different visualizations and different ways to get information out of it.

The real-time visibility across our network infrastructure is good.

The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there. As an organization, we're still trying to figure out the best way to use it across all different skill levels. I worked with some of the sales developers to get a sales view. I'm working with the NOC to get a NOC view, because it is a very information-dense product. Someone who doesn't know what they're doing will easily get lost in it. But it does light up dashboards and views for people who aren't as skilled with it, to answer questions easily.

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

DDoS Alarming allows us to get a feel for the bandwidth of an attack and determine if mitigation is needed to prevent collateral damage. Secondly, the flow analysis lets us look at how traffic is transiting our network. This allows us to optimize metrics to reduce cost.

Kentik answers the flow question: what are my flows, where are they are going, and what can I do to better optimize my connectivity. Kentik also baselines flow behavior and can alert you when there are abnormal flows such as DDoS.

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JN
Sr. Network Manager at Netskope

The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from.

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MP
Director - Site Reliability Engineering at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space. If you get a massive, 100 GB attack coming through, saturating links, you can surface that really quickly and then act to engage DDoS protection or other mitigations from the IPS.

The real-time visibility across our network infrastructure is really good. One of the things that we love it for is our global backbone visualization. Being able to see that utilization in real-time is pretty critical for us.

It also proactively detects network performance degradation and things like availability issues and anomalies when used in concert with the SevOne network management system. In conjunction with that — with all of our polling and availability data coming from that NMS — the flow data provides that type of insight.

We also use Kentik's months of historical data for forensic work. We do 90 days.

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

The DDoS alerting was, at first, the most useful. It was able to alert the entire team of more than 20 that the issues with the website were actually network based, instead of, say, bad code. In time, we mitigated the DDoS attack surface, so the usefulness is still there. We just don't see it every day.

Now we use Kentik for more nuanced traffic insight. This is ad hoc usually, but we do email 'peering' reports daily to the lead network engineers. This gives them some view into new traffic patterns we are picking up in IXes.

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it_user607401 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Security Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Dashboard visualization: I have come to rely on Kentik for a constantly refreshing view that I can quickly customize. There are a lot of graph options, including a flow diagram that shows how traffic has moved over our platform.

  • Kentik Detect: The Detect section of this product provides an excellent way to utilize flow in order to produce alerts. It is very flexible and allows for a number of interesting customizations.

  • Sankey flow diagram: It shows the path that the data takes through my network and in turn allowing me to troubleshoot many issues, without running through a crazy amount of device configs.

  • SQL query: You can directly query the database that Kentik keeps and, via API calls, make it something you can easily integrate into your own product or monitoring tools, or just to produce reports with metrics that might not be a Kentik feature yet.
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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.