Edge

This article provides an overview of the Edge section of the Kentik portal.

About Edge

The Edge section of the Kentik portal provides Network Operations and Engineering teams with the essential visibility and tools to manage the critical boundary between their network and the external world.

Diagram illustrating BGP paths and peering relationships for Brazilian sites. — *Discover Peers visualizes* *your inbound/outbound network traffic and lists Potential Peers (not shown).*

This section focuses entirely on traffic exchanged with external networks, such as transit providers, peering partners, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). By analyzing both network usage (volume, direction, destination) and associated connectivity expenses, Kentik’s Edge Modules empower users to:

Optimize Costs: Identify and reduce spend on transit by verifying invoices, establishing cost baselines, and finding free peering opportunities.
Improve Performance: Reduce latency and hop count for end-users by identifying optimal peering partners and effectively routing traffic.
Plan Capacity: Gain deep, data-driven insights into cost and traffic trends to ensure efficient capacity planning at key interconnection points.

Tip: For information about Kentik’s Core modules, see Core Overview.

Edge Modules

The below table lists the Edge modules along with benefits and related use cases. Follow the links for details on how to use each module.

Edge Module	Benefits	Use Cases
Traffic Costs	Instant visibility into traffic-driven connectivity spend and real-time margin risk identification.	Understand costs of delivering traffic from specific OTT and CDN providers. Analyze customer margin and profitability. Calculate costs to serve specific geographic markets or broadband ISPs. Justify and prepare for pricing negotiations and rate increases.
Connectivity Costs	Understand key drivers of overall network spend and gain automatic cost forecasts to prevent billing surprises.	Validate provider invoices and discover billing errors. Calculate the effective per-Mbps costs (including fixed fees). Establish baselines and benchmarks for interconnection costs.
Traffic Engineering	Automate data collection for engineering, allowing you to determine optimal routing and export actionable recommendations.	Avert capacity crises and minimize use of costly backup links. Precisely measure traffic impact on interface utilization. Balance router loads and allocate outgoing traffic to the most performant peers.
Discover Peers	Fast discovery of peering opportunities to achieve cost optimization and performance improvement (reduced latency).	Identify which networks to peer with and at which interconnection locations. Predict cost and performance impacts before changes are implemented. Monitor utilization trends to inform future capacity decisions.