Kentik launches Traffic Costs, an automated workflow delivering instant cost estimates for granular network traffic slices.
Traffic Costs provides network, financial, and sales teams with insights to optimize spend, improve margins, and drive revenue.
“For service providers in particular, optimizing network spend is essential to maintaining healthy margins between traffic delivery costs and revenue, directly impacting profitability, and competitive positioning,” said Jezzibell Gilmore, VP and GM of Service Providers at Kentik. “Providers want clear visibility into how each customer's traffic impacts their top and bottom lines – understanding traffic routes, costs to deliver, and more, gives providers the insights they need to reach greater profitability.”
Traditionally, obtaining accurate insights into network connectivity and traffic costs has been a significant challenge for infrastructure teams for a number of reasons:
- Complex Cost Structures – Traffic flows across multiple interfaces, transit providers, transport links, IXs, and PNIs, each with its own contract terms and cost structure, making accurate cost allocation difficult.
- Manual, Time-Consuming Analysis – Existing methods rely on multiple tools, spreadsheets, and fragmented data sources, requiring engineers and various cross-functional teams to collaborate piecing together cost estimates manually.
- Data Limitations – Flow-based tracking provides granular visibility but lacks billing accuracy, while SNMP-based utilization captures total traffic but cannot isolate specific slices.
Traffic Costs is a new workflow purpose-built to solve this long-standing problem at scale. By bringing together connectivity contract data, traffic flows, and SNMP utilization, Traffic Costs delivers instant flow-based cost estimates for key slices of traffic. With just a few clicks, operators can instantly see which slices of traffic are driving global connectivity spending – by customer, geographical market, ASN, CDN, OTT services, or even a specific set of IP addresses.
Network operators can use Kentik Traffic Costs to:
- Identify high-cost paths: Instantly surface routes and interconnects driving the most spend – and take action to optimize traffic engineering and interconnect agreements, to reduce costs over time.
- Improve profit margins: See exactly how much a customer’s traffic is costing you, and compare that against revenue to make smarter, more strategic decisions on deal pricing and renewal negotiations.
- Eliminate manual toil: Replace hours of spreadsheet wrangling and data stitching with automated traffic cost insights – freeing engineering teams to focus on higher-impact work.
- Track trends over time: With monthly cost tracking, measure the financial impact of peering optimizations or routing changes – and share progress across teams.
- Democratize cost insights: Make network cost data accessible across the business – from finance to sales to leadership – to enable more accurate services pricing, better contract negotiations, and data-backed decision making.
- More granular traffic slicing. Calculate costs by specific CDNs, OTT services and providers, geographic regions or markets, all the way down to specific customers and IP addresses.
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