OTT Service Tracking

This article introduces the OTT Service Tracking workflow in the Kentik portal.

The page provides an overview of OTT traffic as well as ranked lists of Categories, Providers, and Services. — *The page provides an overview of OTT traffic as well as ranked lists of*
*Categories, Providers, and Services.*

About OTT Service Tracking

Purpose:	Associate traffic with OTT services and providers to understand the services used on your organization's network, correlate performance issues to services, and optimize pricing to reflect subscriber usage.
Benefits:	Identify network traffic origins and growth; assess in-house offering competitiveness. Analyze customer usage patterns to refine plans and pricing. Enhance customer service by providing better information.
Use Cases:	Detect and analyze “content events” to provide timely and efficient guidance for network operations teams. Evaluate OTT utilization metrics for specific categories of users and delivery methods (e.g., CDNs, interconnection types, or PoPs). Assess Mbps-per-subscriber for OTT service impact.Evaluate the ramifications of zero-rating specific content providers. Consider zero-rating content provider implications. Improve customer retention by identifying delivery issues. Analyze suspicious traffic for legal liability. Get alerts on OTT service performance issues.
Relevant Roles:	Network Engineers, Network Strategists, Marketing Leaders, Security Leaders, Executives

The OTT Service Tracking workflow allows you to monitor traffic across different OTT service categories (e.g., video, gaming, social media), view top-X provider breakdowns, and explore detailed traffic for specific services and providers.

This is crucial for engineering leaders and network strategists at eyeball ISPs to ensure reliable, efficient, and cost-effective content delivery to subscribers.

Kentik OTT Engine

OTT Service Tracking is powered by Kentik's True Origin engine, which identifies OTT traffic sources by evaluating and correlating traffic data. It categorizes traffic into three main dimensions: OTT Service Name, OTT Service Category (i.e., service type), OTT Provider Name, and OTT Classification Type.

While True Origin's deterministic classification (via DNS mapping) is highly accurate, a portion of traffic (often 10-20%) can remain unclassified due to factors like external DNS resolvers, simplistic devices, or DNS caching. To address this, Kentik utilizes Intelligent Classification (IQC). This feature applies a statistical and probabilistic model based on known multi-service IP traffic distributions to infer and classify the remaining traffic, providing a more comprehensive view of your network's OTT utilization.

OTT Classification Values

The Classification column indicates how well Kentik has identified OTT Services. The categories align with the OTT Classification Type dimension values available in Data Explorer:

Fully Classified: OTT Service Name, OTT Service Category, and OTT Provider Name are identified.
Intelligently Classified: Traffic probabilistically assigned using the statistical model (Statistical full).
Provider-Only: Only the OTT Provider is identified (Indirect provider-only), typically because multiple services share a hostname.
Pending Classification: High-traffic hostnames without a matching OTT service pattern (Direct ad-hoc and Indirect ad-hoc), allowing True Origin to learn and classify more services over time.
Unclassified: Traffic meeting none of the above conditions, resulting in no identification of OTT Service Name, Type, or Provider due to lack of matching DNS or IP patterns.

OTT Service Tracking Metrics

Metrics in the OTT Service Tracking module vary by context:

Capacity tab values (e.g., traffic bitrates) are based on SNMP OID Polling, showing maximum bitrates during the highest traffic time range (see Table Time-Slicing).
Other traffic values are derived from flow data (e.g., NetFlow), classified via DNS matching based on IPs (see OTT Classification Values and Using True Origin).

Next, let’s move onto Getting Started with OTT Service Tracking.