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July 24, 2019

Kentik Launches AIOps Platform for Network Professionals

SAN FRANCISCO, July 24, 2019 – Kentik, provider of the only AIOps platform specifically for network professionals, today announced significant product developments which expand the company’s analytics offering beyond real-time network visibility and alerting to deliver comprehensive proactive insights that provide recommendations and drive automated actions. The move aims to make managing networks significantly easier, across service provider, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Inside nearly every business today, network teams struggle with the growth and complexity of infrastructure. What were once straightforward networking practices are now exceeding human operational scale. As a result, outages and degradations that directly impact almost every business are becoming increasingly difficult to anticipate or correct quickly enough. According to industry reports, the average cost of IT downtime is estimated to be over $300,000 per hour. Increasing infrastructure diversity, including multi-vendor, overlay-driven networking and the addition of new public cloud environments, make it even more challenging. The network complexity risk to the business cannot be ignored.

“The dynamic and distributed nature of today’s complex networks, from the enterprise premises to the cloud and providers in between, demand a new paradigm and a new set of AI capabilities that operate efficiently and at scale,” said Avi Freedman, Co-founder and CEO of Kentik. “By launching the first AIOps platform for the network professional, we are bringing cutting-edge operational and automation techniques to the groups who run the infrastructures that power the digital world.”

What is AIOps?

AIOps (i.e., Artificial Intelligence for Operations) is a transformational set of technologies for IT operations that leverages big data techniques to aggregate diverse data sources, using streaming technologies for correlation and enrichment. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are then applied to extract value from the data. The insights produced are used to drive automation, notification, and communication – with the goal of making discoveries long before humans can manually sift through vast swaths of data. In broader technology groups, AIOps is already being utilized. For example, AIOps for IT operations can dramatically reduce ticket noise by detecting and escalating actual issues to the IT help desk for faster resolution.

AIOps from Kentik

Kentik leverages existing network data to power workflows that automate the most time-consuming manual troubleshooting and analysis tasks, enabling networking professionals to focus more on growth rather than firefighting. That includes applying AIOps concepts to network diagnostics, forensics, capacity management, and automation – all to ensure fast, secure, and performant delivery of applications and digital services.

“There’s no cloud without the network, and effective network operations without proper visibility is almost impossible to achieve. That’s a challenge that Kentik is purpose-built to resolve,” said Denis Ducharme, Program Director for IBM Cloud Platform Network and Infrastructure, a Kentik customer. “The ability of Kentik’s platform to detect anomalies, facilitate rapid problem identification, and automate corrective responses is key to delivering highly-available cloud services.”

“When we created the NPMD market, it was important for us to include diagnostics as part of it. At the time, the drive towards workflows and guided diagnostics, driven by machine learning, were the underpinnings of AIOps,” said Kentik CTO Jonah Kowall, former Gartner Research Vice President for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD). “At Kentik, we have included intuitive onboarding and workflows to make optimizing and managing a network easier. We also surface interesting and/or anomalous data so teams can quickly implement integrations with their favorite systems for automation and notification. Underpinning these new workflows and future plans is the Kentik Data Platform, which is able to collect and correlate large volumes of traffic data and enrich that data in real-time with associated metadata. The result is that we’re able to address the needs of large-scale service providers, enterprises, and the SaaS businesses we use daily.”

Kentik’s new solution extends its existing architecture with substantial new capabilities, which were designed based on feedback from networking professionals running some of the world’s largest networks at leading enterprise and service provider organizations. Empowering network professionals to efficiently identify, troubleshoot, and resolve real issues on their networks faster than ever, Kentik’s AIOps platform is focused on four core areas:

  • Network Operations – Kentik’s AIOps solution enables NetOps and DevOps teams to understand infrastructure and traffic, including core and backbone, to/from the cloud, data centers, WAN and campus environments. This includes forecasting traffic growth and capacity run-out dates and alerting on traffic and performance anomalies that may indicate performance problems or service degradation.
  • Edge – AIOps from Kentik allow operations and engineering teams to understand their network utilization and costs on their edge networks. This includes predicting cost overages and alerting on traffic spikes so teams can proactively shift traffic to alternative paths to avoid network congestion.
  • Network Protection – Kentik’s AIOps solution develops smart baselines and thresholds and integrates threat and repuation data, enabling NetOps and SecOps teams to automatically recognize traffic anomalies, investigate volumetric incidents such as DDoS attacks, and automatically prevent threats from causing performance and availability issues.
  • Service Provider – Many of Kentik’s customers are the service providers that create and operate the digital infrastructure. AIOps from Kentik enable this group of networkers to understand how services they provide to their customers and subscribers are being used. This includes being able to proactively discover service issues, network abuse and usage patterns that impacts customer experience, as well as understand the cost to the provider of each customer and subscriber.

Kentik’s AIOps platform is available for early access to existing customers. The platform will be generally available in October 2019. For more information, download a solution brief—Kentik for Enterprises or Kentik for Service Providers—or request a demo. To learn about the market landscape, download Kentik’s report on “The State of Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning in Network Management,” which was also released today.

About Kentik

For businesses running dynamic and complex networks that exceed efficient human operational scale, Kentik is the provider of the only AIOps platform specifically designed for network professionals. Kentik uniquely unifies diverse data streams across cloud and traditional infrastructure to produce instant insights that accelerate network team efficiency, automate issue resolution, and create new business capabilities. Kentik is based in San Francisco. Learn more at kentik.com.


Source: Kentik 

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