Kentik announced a major expansion of Kentik Detect, its flagship solution for cloud-based network visibility and analytics, which now offers Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peering analytics, giving network operators deep, flexible and actionable insight into how their traffic traverses the Internet.

Using Kentik Detect’s BGP path-aware visualizations, network operators can see how much Internet traffic is flowing from their network to neighboring networks, through intermediate transit networks, and ultimately to destination networks and countries. Content providers can identify the geographical regions receiving the most traffic and choose optimal peering and transit agreements. Network managers can see anomalies that might indicate costly configuration errors. Large ISPs and wholesale providers can even identify business prospects by examining downstream traffic.

“Practical peering analytics has simply been inaccessible for the vast majority of network operators,” said Avi Freedman, Kentik CEO. “At best, legacy home-grown and commercial solutions could generate some pretty pictures, but which were static and useless for operational purposes. We designed Kentik Detect for the cloud era, with scale-out technology that ingests and queries billions of non-summarized traffic and routing records per customer. Kentik Detect’s new peering analysis lets network operators rapidly assemble vast sets of network data and perform real-time, recursive analytics to answer real-world questions.”

“Kentik’s team knows firsthand the problems involved in managing large-scale networks, and has designed a SaaS platform specifically tailored for that target market,” said Jennifer P. Clark, Vice President of Network Research for 451 Research. “The addition of peering analytics broadens the use cases and value of Kentik’s Big Data engine and cloud-scale approach to network traffic monitoring and showcases the company’s real-world know-how in network operations.”

Kentik Detect’s Peering Analytics capabilities include:

- Big Data Infrastructure: Complete analytical access to at least 90 days of raw NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX records fused with BGP routing and GeoIP data

- Customizable Datasets: Easy-to-use wizards for setting key filter criteria via field text search plus an advanced configuration tool.

- Intuitive and Interactive Visualizations: Sankey diagrams make it easy to understand relative traffic volumes via visual depictions of top BGP paths, Next-Hop ASNs, Transit ASNs, Last-Hop ASNs, and Destination Countries.

- Responsive Tools: Analytics can be quickly narrowed or adjusted through a variety of real-time tools including ASN drill-downs, exporting device selection, ASN and interface filters and a convenient ‘ignore first hop’ checkbox.

- Practical Reports: For any particular ASN, network operators can see tables and charts depicting total traffic transiting the ASN, as well as top traffic paths, devices, top source, destination and countries.