As more organizations take advantage of distributed architectures for their applications, there is a corresponding increase in the complexity that exists at the network layer. All of those individual component parts need to be joined together somehow, and it is the network that has to resolve all of the complexity inherent in these new approaches to application construction.
To ensure the maximum reliability and performance from this complex network structure, a number of tools have been developed. The vendors behind these tools all suggest that traditional network monitoring tools can't hope to meet the needs of today's far more complex design patterns. One of these vendors is Kentik. Kentik is a cloud-based network visibility and analytics solution that offers a panoramic view of any network.
Kentik was founded by veterans of a number of credible organizations - both those providing network services and those consuming at scale - the founders have diverse backgrounds from companies such as Akamai, CloudFlare, YouTube, and Netflix. Headquartered in San Francisco, Kentik is today both coming out of stealth and announcing a significant $12.1 million Series A funding round. This funding round adds to the $3.1 million seed round that Kentik raised late last year,
Previously known as CloudHelix, Kentik is built on top of a big data engine and provides granular insights gleaned from flow, SNMP, and BGP data. Interestingly for such an early stage company, Kentik has already seen some market uptake - both Yelp and Box are using the product within their operations. Yelp sees 100 million monthly users to its properties and Sam Eaton, Director of Engineering Operations at Yelp points to the ability to look deeply into all network traffic as a benefit that Kentik brings. In the case of Box, similar broad visibility is the stated benefit, in particular, Box is obtaining new details regarding the geographic distribution of its traffic down to the city level that it is finding useful.
The Kentik solution accepts flow data from network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers or appliances. In terms of how the product is delivered, Kentik is available as public SaaS or on-premise private SaaS. Pricing for both options is subscription-based.
Clearly there is a need for flexible and broad network monitoring tools like Kentik - global IP traffic is forecasted to surpass the zettabyte (1,000 exabytes) level in 2016. Traditional monitoring tools lack both the visibility and the scalability to meet this demand. No longer will siloed management tools suffice.
That said, there are lots of tools trying to solve the monitoring problem - NewRelic, LogicMonitor, and DataDog all come at the same problem, albeit from slightly different angles. It will be interesting to see how Kentik parlays some high-profile names and impressive funding into market success.
