Kentik announced updates to its network analytics platform, Kentik Detect.

The developments – which enable added context and ease of use for fast network insights – are part of Kentik's mission to provide enterprises and service providers with real-time actionable intelligence for both technical and business operations.

"SD-WAN, multi-cloud environments, managed infrastructure, and a dozen other digital transformation trends are making networks continuously more distributed and complex, scaling them beyond what traditional network visibility tools are capable of managing and securing," said Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik. "From the beginning, we built our platform to provide the market with a network traffic intelligence solution that moves beyond data exploration and drives fast, accessible, context-driven insights. These latest product developments are another step forward for proving the truth in network traffic, enabling everyone from network operators, to security teams, to IT managers and executives to easily adopt and extract useful insights from network traffic for better technical and business outcomes."

The following capabilities are now generally available in Kentik Detect:

- Fast Business Intelligence – Kentik's new "Custom Dimensions" makes data more valuable for managers and executives by mapping business data, such as physical locations, onto network data for instant context. It enables a deeper understanding not just of IP addresses, network interfaces, ports, and protocols, but also provides instant context into details such as which customers, categories, and service names could be affected by an incident, informing faster decision-making for response.

- Application and Cloud Performance Insights – Kentik's new software agent, called "kprobe," can collect traffic data directly from hosts, and delivers application context and performance by monitoring incoming and outgoing packets on any network interface. The agent allows scalable collection of network performance (loss / latency) measurements, and layer 7 application decodes from VMs, hypervisors, and machines running tens of gigabits of production traffic, and can also run in public cloud environments where traditional flow data is not available.

- CDN Attribution – This makes it possible for Kentik Detect to tag traffic associated with commercial CDNs, regardless of where the traffic originated – from within the CDN's own network infrastructure, from another network operator's infrastructure, or from caches deployed in their own network. Network operations teams at both service providers and enterprises can now make more informed decisions about where and how to receive these large-volume traffic flows, and better manage their infrastructure, capacity, and costs.

- Threat Feeds – Through a new integration with one of the industry's leading threat intelligence providers, Kentik Detect now uses comprehensive IP reputation data to tag traffic associated with suspected malicious sources or destinations. Hosts that are identified may be infected with malware, participating in botnets, or engaged in other undesirable activity, and can be flagged for customer notification, clean-up, removal from the network, or other security enforcement.

- Capacity Analytics – A dedicated capacity planning workflow inside the Kentik Detect UI eliminates the external spreadsheets, complicated formulas and manual calculations that capacity planners have historically dealt with. Physical and logical objects in the network, such as interfaces, peers, markets, or other dimensions, are organized by percent capacity with projected run-out dates, instantly highlighting and prioritizing items where near-term overutilization threatens network availability.

Kentik also added the following capabilities to its platform for greater accessibility for organization-wide intelligence:

- New User Interface (UI) – Even if you don't operate the network, you can gain intelligence from the data it generates. Kentik's new v3 UI is replatformed to help customers arrive at insights faster. The updates include Guided Mode Dashboards which provide curated, actionable insight for management and non-networking users. New Nested Dashboards group workflows by use case, and reduce time on drilling-down to root cause. Overall, the v3 UI is designed to deliver more out-of-the-box value to Kentik users.

- Single Sign-On (SSO) – To make it more convenient for users across the organization to access Kentik, and to enable centralized authentication, Kentik has rolled out SSO for Kentik Detect. That means Kentik users are now able to access the portal via industry standard SAML2-based authentication services, including Okta, OneLogin, Google, Ping, Duo, and Shibboleth, which are commonly used to access other SaaS-based products.