Based in San Francisco, Kentik is roughly 5 years old with 70+ employees. Of its 200+ worldwide customers, the percentage between enterprise and service provider customers is split evenly. Kentik is an analytics company focused on network infrastructure that turns your network traffic into an operational and business value.
The #NFD19 Tech Field Day delegates met with the following Kentik representatives:
- Avi Freedman, CEO\Co-Founder (Pro Perl user)
- Jim Meehan, Director of Product Marketing
- Michelle Kincaid, Director of Communications
- Crystal Li, Senior Product Manager
We began the day with Avi Freedman’s presentation which included an introduction, a tech talk and what’s ahead for Kentik moving forward.
Kentik’s focus is to be able to observe everything, store the data, allow machines to sift through the data but it’s critical that humans are still a part of the equation to understand the network stack in real-time. The focus has always been on the network, security and operations side. Kentik’s primary work has been with infrastructure operations using Network Observability with a Software as a Service offering that allows the data to flow in, which then ties into automation. The end goal is to enrich the data so it’s easy to understand and analyze.
Kentik’s use cases include performance, congestion, security, DDOS detection and forensics to name a few. Groups that use Kentik services\products are primarily architects, operations, planning and NOC (network operations center).
How does Kentik fit in the Stack? Examples include network, metrics, logging, tracing, testing and APM.
Kentiks’s next presentation was provided by Jim Meehan and he discussed the Service Provider.
Avi then followed up with a Tech Talk that dove deeper into augmentation and network traffic enrichment. The purpose is to define what the network traffic means to you in terms of application user, revenue including a deeper understanding of network data. This includes tagging to define what the traffic means and how the routing tables are built in an efficient manner.
This all begins at the Fusion layer in the Kentik Platform. Data is taken live from multiple sources, then programming the metadata via API and its then augmented before it goes downstream.
The Flux Reactor is then introduced into the process. It takes the traffic, puts it all together with the routing tables and then sends it out. Keep in mind, this is being processed LIVE.
Crystal Li and Jim Meehan then provided the Tech Field Day delegates and the audience viewing the presentation via live stream a demo. Its purpose was to allow the delegates to connect to a Sock Shop to generate traffic. By doing so, Jim and Crystal were able to show us information being processed and then a report was created shortly thereafter.
To close out the day, Avi’s wrap up was focused on Kentik’s future which included a negative road up which essentially includes things Kentik’s doesn’t plan on doing in the near future.
Michelle Kincaid (Director of Communications) provided a synopsis of the event and it can be found here.
The names for each of the YouTube videos is listed below with a hyperlink for your convenience.
For more information about Kentik, Tech Field Day and how to become a TFD – please click on the links below:
Please take a moment to subscribe to the YouTube channel which also includes watching the various videos that were posted throughout the day. Kudos to PrimeImage Media for recording the live sessions.
Credit also goes to Stephen Foskett, Tom Hollingsworth, Ben Gage, Mel Zura and the entire Tech Field Day staff for coordinating a seamless event.
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