Kentik announced significant product developments which expand the company's analytics offering beyond real-time network visibility and alerting to deliver comprehensive
proactive insights that provide recommendations and drive automated actions. The move aims to make managing networks significantly easier, across service provider, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
Inside nearly every business today, network teams struggle with the growth
and complexity of infrastructure. What were once straightforward networking practices are now exceeding human operational scale. As a result, outages and degradations that directly impact almost every business are becoming increasingly difficult to anticipate
or correct quickly enough.
According
to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is estimated to
be "well over $300,000 per hour." Increasing infrastructure diversity, including multi-vendor, overlay-driven networking and the addition of new public cloud environments, make it even more challenging. The network complexity risk to the business cannot be
ignored.
"Today's network complexity and diversity require the role of an expert-generalist,
that is, someone who can go fairly deep in a wide variety of different networking and application delivery technologies; however, this resource is typically scarce within any given organization," said Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik. "This is the
reason we've launched the first AIOps platform specifically for the network professional, offering the only solution to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of network teams and drive efficient operations as scale and diversity continues to increase
year over year in the infrastructure they operate."
What is AIOps?AIOps (i.e. Artificial Intelligence for Operations) is a transformational
set of technologies for IT operations that leverages big data techniques to aggregate diverse data sources, using streaming technologies for correlation and enrichment. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are then applied to extract value
from the data. The insights produced are used to drive automation, notification, and communication - with the goal of making discoveries long before humans can manually sift through vast swaths of data. In broader technology groups, AIOps is already being
utilized. For example, AIOps for IT operations can dramatically reduce ticket noise by detecting and escalating actual issues to the IT help desk for faster resolution.
AIOps from KentikKentik leverages existing network data to power workflows that automate
the most time-consuming manual troubleshooting and analysis tasks, enabling networking professionals to focus more on growth rather than firefighting. That includes applying AIOps concepts to network diagnostics, forensics, capacity management, and automation
- all to ensure fast, secure, and performant delivery of applications and digital services.
"There's no cloud without the network, and effective network operations without proper visibility is almost impossible to achieve. That's a challenge that Kentik is purpose-built to resolve," said Denis Ducharme, Program Director for IBM Cloud Platform Network and Infrastructure, a Kentik customer. "The ability of Kentik's platform to detect anomalies, facilitate rapid problem identification, and automate corrective responses is key to delivering highly-available cloud services."
"When we created the NPMD market, it was important for us to include diagnostics
as part of it. At the time, the drive towards workflows and guided diagnostics, driven by machine learning, were the underpinnings of AIOps," said Kentik CTO Jonah Kowall, former Gartner Research Vice President for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics
(NPMD). "At Kentik, we have included intuitive onboarding and workflows to make optimizing and managing a network easier. We also surface interesting and/or anomalous data so teams can quickly implement integrations with their favorite systems for automation
and notification. Underpinning these new workflows and future plans is the Kentik Data Platform, which is able to collect and correlate large volumes of traffic data and enrich that data in real-time with associated metadata. The result is that we're able
to address the needs of large-scale service providers, enterprises, and the SaaS businesses we use daily."
Kentik's new solution extends its existing architecture with substantial
new capabilities, which were designed based on feedback from networking professionals running some of the world's largest networks at leading enterprise and service provider organizations. Empowering network professionals to efficiently identify, troubleshoot,
and resolve real issues on their networks faster than ever, Kentik's AIOps platform is focused on four core areas:
- Network
Operations - Kentik's AIOps solution enables NetOps and DevOps teams to understand
infrastructure and traffic, including core and backbone, to/from the cloud, data centers, WAN and campus environments. This includes forecasting traffic growth and capacity run-out dates and alerting on traffic anomalies that may indicate performance problems
or service degradation.
- Network
Protection - Kentik's AIOps solution develops smart baselines and thresholds, enabling
NetOps and SecOps teams to automatically recognize traffic anomalies, investigate volumetric incidents such as DDoS attacks, and automatically prevent threats from causing performance and availability issues.
-
Service Provider
- The majority of Kentik's early customers are service providers.
AIOps from Kentik enable this group of networkers to understand how services they provide to their customers and subscribers are being used. This includes being able to proactively discover service issues, network abuse and usage patterns that impacts customer
experience, as well as understand the cost to the provider of each customer and subscriber.
Kentik's AIOps platform is available for early access to existing customers.
The platform will be generally available in October 2019.