Edge

This article covers the Edge section of the Kentik portal.

About Edge

The Edge section of the Kentik portal enables Ops/Engineering to better understand both network utilization and costs related to traffic coming from or going to external networks. Edge is intended to give you actionable information that can help you reduce costs (e.g., by peering with ASes whose traffic you've been receiving via transit), improve performance (e.g., by reducing hops in the routes to your network), and plan in advance for shifts in network utilization (e.g., estimate, based on current trends, when your externally facing interfaces will approach capacity).      

Edge Modules

The Edge section of the portal includes the following modules/workflows:

• Connectivity Costs: Helps you understand how traffic entering or exiting external interfaces (e.g., transit and/or peering) impacts your operational costs.

  • Use your own network data to check the accuracy of billing statements from transit providers.

  • Visually detect and understand unexpected changes in cost, and drill into the root cause of those changes.

  • Surface current cost trends that you can apply to your network planning and forecasting.

  • Surface historical cost trends across providers (this feature is not currently available).

• Traffic Engineering: Helps you control network costs and avoid congestion on busy interfaces.

  • Looking at the traffic volume over an interface, you can determine how much traffic, in terms of percentage, you'd like to shift elsewhere.

  • Using this traffic amount, as well as user-specified values for device, interface, and direction, Kentik will analyze link capacity on your network and recommend groups of AS Paths or source/destination prefixes via which the excess traffic can be rerouted.

• Discover Peers: Helps you find peering opportunities.

  • Peering (direct connection between networks) offers two main advantages over purchasing transit from providers:

    • Cuts your costs.

    • Increases end-user performance by reducing transmission and processing delays.

  • Our analytics reveal the ultimate destinations of traffic you sent via paid links, and the sources of traffic sent to you via paid links.

  • Create dynamic denial lists for networks you can’t peer with and get alerts when traffic that could be peered is routed over paid interfaces.