Kentik announced a product expansion that adds deep visibility into the Google Cloud Platform. With Kentik Detect, enterprises can get real-time insights from VPC Flow Logs for their Google Cloud Platform environments to optimize network performance, security, and user experience.

With traffic on the rise, Google recently introduced VPC (virtual private cloud) Flow Logs to its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for users to gain “network transparency in near real-time.”

Gaining actionable intelligence from flow logs requires a modern, scalable network analytics solution, which is why Kentik expanded its platform to support Google’s VPC Flow Logs. Kentik’s support of VPC Flow Logs as a primary data source means that Kentik customers gain full visibility into network activity within their GCP environments ― and also between GCP and traditional data centers in hybrid cloud architectures.

“A majority of enterprises we talk to report both a growing need for visibility into their hybrid cloud environments, and the increased complexity of hybrid cloud networking,” said Avi Freedman, Co-founder and CEO of Kentik. “With five-second granularity, Google’s VPC Flow Logs provide an outstanding level of detail, and Google is unique in exposing performance data in their flow logs. Kentik’s customers have been excited about adding Google’s VPC Flow Logs to Kentik Detect to get agentless visibility and even better management of the performance, security, and user experience of all of their applications, whether they live in traditional infrastructure, GCP, or both.”

By adding support for Google VPC Flow Logs, Kentik users across the organization gain visibility into hybrid environments, including:

- NetOps & NetEng Teams – Network operators and engineers gain the ability to visualize traffic flows and service dependencies for a data-driven approach to cloud infrastructure planning, growth, and cost management.

- SecOps Teams – Security engineering and operations teams gain pervasive instrumentation of potential threat activity to, from, and within GCP projects for faster incident response and more granular forensic analysis.

- DevOps & SRE Teams – Fast filtering, pivots, and drill-downs provide instant situational awareness, so DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams can quickly get to root cause and gather the details they need to restore services to a healthy state.

- Executives – With customizable dashboards and an intuitive UI, executives can leverage insights from Kentik to see the big picture, understand changes in user/customer experience KPIs, and better manage cloud infrastructure spend, budgets, and expectations.