Network operators have long struggled with a critical blind spot: understanding the true economics of their traffic delivery. While they can see what traffic flows across their networks and track overall utilization, connecting those flows to actual dollars spent on transit providers, internet exchanges, and peering agreements has remained a manual, time-intensive process involving spreadsheets, fragmented data sources, and countless hours of engineering time.
Kentik is looking to change that equation with the launch of Traffic Costs, what the company calls an industry-first automated network cost intelligence workflow. In this exclusive VMblog interview, Lauren Basile, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Kentik, explains how this new capability gives service providers and enterprises real-time visibility into what traffic is actually driving their network connectivity spend, effectively putting their infrastructure costs “under an X-ray” to reveal previously hidden economics and enable smarter business decisions across engineering, finance, and sales teams.
VMblog: What is “Traffic Costs” and what does this unlock for Kentik customers?
Lauren Basile: Traffic Costs is Kentik’s new automated, network cost intelligence workflow that gives service providers and enterprises real-time visibility into what traffic is driving network connectivity spend. It takes the dollars you’re paying to transit providers, internet exchanges (IXs), and peers, and connects them directly to network traffic – giving network operators visibility into how much customers, applications, and regions are driving that spend.
For customers, this unlocks the ability to:
- Identify high-cost paths and optimize spend: 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 and increase revenue: See exactly how much a customer’s traffic or traffic to a geographic region 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.
- 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.
VMblog: The press release says this is an industry first — why wasn’t this capability possible before?
Basile: 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 – Traffic-based tracking provides granular visibility but lacks billing accuracy, while SNMP-based utilization captures total traffic but cannot isolate specific slices.
Accurately calculating the cost of just one slice of traffic requires a labor-intensive, multi-step process that consumes valuable engineering resource cycles. Large service providers and digital enterprise networks need to track costs across hundreds or even thousands of other networks to support engineering, commercial, and finance teams. The complexity and reliance on manual correlation make network cost analysis an ongoing burden, leading to missed optimization opportunities and unnecessary expenses. Additionally, the data is often siloed and inaccessible to the broader organization-leaving sales, finance, and product teams flying blind and unable to make fully informed decisions about pricing or customer profitability.
VMblog: How does this new product fit into the larger Network AI story Kentik is leading?
Basile: Traffic Costs is a major development in Kentik’s Network AI vision – accelerating work with true network intelligence about cost, performance, security, and business impact. With Traffic Costs, Kentik turns what used to be siloed or missing – the economics of traffic delivery – into accessible, real-time intelligence for everyone from engineers to CFOs. This connects directly to Kentik’s broader Network AI story: using automation and AI workflows to demystify complex operations, free experts from manual toil, and align infrastructure decisions with business outcomes.
VMblog: Give a behind-the-scenes look at the technology and data that make Traffic Costs possible.
Basile: Traffic Costs works by correlating three traditionally separate data sources:
- Contractual data – Pricing models and terms across all providers and interconnection types.
- SNMP utilization data – Real-time visibility into volumes traversing each interface.
- Flow data – Granular insight into what the traffic actually is (ASNs, OTTs, CDNs, customers, geographies, IP groups).
Kentik’s platform unifies these data sets and automates the mapping of flows to cost. That means in just a few clicks, operators can calculate the true cost of key traffic slices, see cost-per-Mbps by route or customer, and even track how costs change over time with automated snapshots. This behind-the-scenes data fusion is why customers describe Traffic Costs as “like putting connectivity spend under an X-ray.” It exposes the hidden economics of the network in a way that was previously impractical without armies of analysts and spreadsheets.
Check out our demo video to see a behind-the-scenes look at Kentik Traffic Costs: https://www.kentik.com/resources/traffic-costs-video/.
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