Monday, October 04, 2021

Kentik - Get Observability and Monitoring Under Control

 Kentik presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 15, 2021 and I think Kentik is on the right journey around doing observability and monitoring for enterprise networks. They understand they have to support all the traditional capabilities within networks but they also need to have full support and capabilities for public cloud services. I was very interested in what they are doing with Kentik Firehose which aggregates message bus/queue, observability, real-time analytics and data lake sources and provides telemetry and context. This seems like a super useful tool for companies who have a wide variety of cloud and other systems generating data. Check out Avi Feedman's presentation, it is worth listening to their strategy and how they want to address these issues that almost all companies are going to be facing.


They had a pretty impressive list of new features and capabilities. I think their focus on cloud to on-premises integration is going to be critical.


Kentik also showed off what they are doing for Observability for Cloud Networkers. This is an extremely hard space right now. Each public cloud provider does networking and the associated logging, telemetry and observability data differently. So it is a major pain to integrate it and have some sort of end to end solution that actually helps you determine what the problem or problems actually are so I think they are on to something.

For now, Kentik is a company to keep an eye on and see if their innovate in the right areas to address customers needs. It sure looks like they are heading in the right direction and I think they have a useful product that helps replace a lot of legacy logging and monitoring solutions we have typically deployed in the past with something more modern and extensible.

You can also check out Dr. Peter Welcher's LinkedIn post about Kentik. A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since the event was during Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.