The cloud network has unmatched resilience, agility and scalability, and all that makes moving to cloud a worthwhile pursuit. But there’s a side that enterprises don’t discover until too late. Unpredictable costs is a norm in the cloud. Cloud with its managed infrastructure was supposed to bring down the costs of networking, but it never delivered on that promise. However, the fact that not many enterprises are fully aware of is that serious cutbacks are possible even in the cloud if all hidden costs are timely uncovered and managed. Kentik helps with that!
Kentik presented the Kentik Network Observability Cloud Platform at the recent Cloud Field Day event in California where they explained how it helps companies dial down their cloud infrastructure spend with deep observability.
Legacy Monitoring Solutions Only Show a Partial Picture
Not all network monitoring solutions are made equal. The legacy monitoring appliances are especially unfit for modern networks. Having originated from much simpler, smaller networks, these tools are not up to the task for networks of today’s size and complexity. They are built for one type of network and can look at only one type of telemetry. They have large monolithic architectures and slim integrations. And their querying and alerting capabilities are slow, limited and extremely basic.
These tools cannot provide visibility into all the parameters that contribute to the sky-high cloud costs. With prominent cloud vendors like GCP, Azure and AWS, it gets expensive chiefly because of things like transit costs and gateway costs, and unless you have eyes on all the traffic and their movements, it’s not possible to track down the culprits that are inflating the cost.
Seeing the Complete Picture Out-of-the-Box with Kentik
Founded by a group of network professionals, Kentik’s founders knew from the beginning the problems of conventional monitoring tools, having worked in the industry for many years. So they took the observability challenges and turned them on their head.
To Kentik, good observability is the ability to consume data that the network is emitting in big bulks and make sense of it. So they built a solution that can provide fast querying capabilities for large datasets so that information is always at the fingertips. Kentik does full observability by taking in data from all over the network and putting together a holistic picture.
Finding Hidden Costs with Kentik
At the recent Cloud Field Day event, Solutions Engineer, Mike Krygeris showcased the Kentik Network Observability Cloud Platform. In a 30-minute presentation, he talked about the observability challenges with conventional monitoring tools and how Kentik surmounts those challenges.
Kentik helps minimize the cost of transferring data through NAT gateways by enriching flow data with context that reveals hidden costs in the cloud. Kentik covers all network types from cloud to the internet, datacenters to the edge, and produces a unified information bank that can be queried easily.
Ingesting data at 8 million records per second, Kentik aggregates the data combining flow data with metadata collected from all areas of the network in real time. This creates bigger context-rich datasets. The fast query engine powering the databases make sure that networking professionals can swiftly pull out information with full context and find answers to all questions without waiting.
In its easy-to-read dashboard, Kentik puts together logical maps for easy visualization. Made using metadata from configurations after an environment is on-boarded, these maps help understand traffic flow in the network. Using default filters, network engineers can fine-tune the search results to see traffic by IP addresses. The view accommodates a lot of tenancies by shrinking the icons’ size, thus fitting all of the infrastructure in one page.
Additionally, network professionals can peek inside the clusters by zooming into the parameters to get raw numbers on performance and flow.
Wrapping Up
Replatforming applications to cloud entails moving massive amount of data and multiple copies of that data in each instance. The cloud services required to move, store and mine that data cost a baffling amount of money. An observability solution like Kentik can greatly help with navigating the complex cloud cost landscape with instant and end-to-end visibility that enables operators to slice and dice the easily missed components that make cloud expensive. With it, enterprises can manage their cloud spend and get realistically higher ROI, but more importantly, they can monitor the network deeply and widely in near-real time.
To know more about the Kentik Network Observability Cloud Platform, check out Kentik’s other presentations on it from the recent Cloud Field Day event.
