v3 Portal Overview

This article provides a high-level introduction to the Kentik v3 portal, which is covered in the following topics:

• About the v3 Portal
• Portal Navbar
• Universal Search
• User Menu
• Portal Sections

Note: For a look at the various visualization types supported in the portal's data views, see Chart View Types.

The Kentik v3 portal was launched in 2017, marking a major upgrade in the design and functionality of the user interface for Kentik. The v3 portal was superseded by the v4 portal in 2019. While the v3 portal remains available for customers who prefer various aspects of the v3 UI, Kentik is not maintaining feature parity between the two portals. To take advantage of the complete range of Kentik capabilities customers are advised to make a full transition to the v4 portal (see Portal Overview).

Note: For information on browser support and login procedures for the Kentik portals, see Kentik Portals.

The portal navbar provides access to the various sections of the portal as well as to certain high-level functions and settings. The navbar includes the following UI elements:

• Kentik logo: Click to navigate to the default landing page specified in your User Profile.
• Section menus: Buttons and menus that enable access to the various sections of the portal; see Section Menus.
• Universal Search (magnifying glass icon): Enter a string to open the Universal Search modal, which will display results relevant to the entered string.
• User menu: Displays user information and enables access to various high-level user-related functions, including the User Profile.

The section menus take you to the following sections of the portal:

• Library button: Click to navigate to the Library section of the portal.
• Data Explorer button: Click to navigate to the Data Explorer section of the portal.
• Alerting button: Click to navigate to the Alerting section of the portal.
• Analytics menu: Opens a drop-down menu that enables you to navigate to one of the Analytics pages.
• Admin button: Click to navigate to the Admin section of the portal.

Universal Search allows you to search for a string across the various databases that store settings and user-created objects for your organization’s instance of the Kentik portal. Universal Search is covered in the following topics:

• Universal Search Modal
• Universal Search Categories
• Quick Nav Buttons

The Universal Search modal is shown whenever you do one of the following:

• Enter text into the Universal Search input field on the Portal Navbar.
• Press Shift + S on your keyboard.

The modal includes the following main UI elements:

• Results summary: A strip just below the navbar that indicates the number of matches found for the search string.
• Close button: Click the X in the upper right corner to close the modal.
• Results menu: A list, in the sidebar at the left of the modal, of the search categories in which results were found (see Universal Search Categories). The number of results in each category is indicated in parentheses.
• Results list: A categorized list of matches found for the search string. The order of categories is based on the number of matches in each category. Click on a result to go to the corresponding item in the portal.

The following list shows the categories of data that are searched, and by which results are grouped when returned in the Universal Search modal. The data fields that are searched are listed for each category:

• Alert Policies: ID, policy name, policy description
• Custom Dimensions: ID, column name, description
• Dashboards: ID, title, description
• Devices: ID, name, description, SNMP community, SNMP ip, sending IPs, sending IPs base, device proxy BGP, device proxy BGP 6
• Flow Tags: ID, flow tag
• Interfaces: ID, connectivity type, interface description, interface IP, SNMP ID, SNMP alias
• Mitigation Methods: ID, method name, method description, method mitigation device type, method mitigation device detail, white list
• Mitigation Platforms: ID, platform name, platform description, platform mitigation device type, platform mitigation device detail
• Notification Channels: ID, channel type, notification desc, notification kvs, notification name, notification value
• Peering Analytics: ID, device IDs, report name, report pub name
• Plans: ID, name, description
• Reports: template ID, template name, template description
• Saved Filters: ID, name, description
• Saved Views: ID, name, description
• Silent Mode: ID, alert key, comment
• Sites: ID, title, address, city, region, country
• Subscriptions: ID, title, subtitle, recipients
• Users: ID, user name, user full name, user email

Note: Dashboards, Saved Views, and Reports are grouped together as “Reports” in the results list.

In addition to the above, a search may return one or both of the following:

• Quick Nav: Buttons that link directly to destinations in the portal or related content (see Quick Nav Buttons).
• Documentation: A list of up to 10 excerpts, relevant to the search string, from the Kentik Knowledge Base.
  Note: The Documentation list in Universal Search is not intended as a substitute for the Search tab of the KB, which will typically yield a fuller set of results and enables you to successively narrow your search by searching within results.

Quick Nav buttons link directly to a page corresponding to a keyword included in the search string. For example, if the search string is “configure scoreboard,” the Quick Nav results will include an Active Alerts button because “scoreboard” is a keyword for that button. The table below lists the Quick Nav buttons currently supported by Universal Search, where they link to, and where in the Knowledge Base you can find information about those destinations.

Note: The keywords associated with each Quick Nav button are not specified above because they will be refined on an ongoing basis.

The user menu lives at the right end of the navbar, and has two states. In the collapsed state it shows the user name and company name. When clicked, the menu opens to show the following options:

• My Profile: Goes to your User Profile.
• Recent Exports: Opens the Recent Exports dialog, which lists the format (PDF, PNG, etc.), name, and generated date of the files that you’ve recently exported from Kentik (see Export Chart or Table).
• Use Dark Theme: Switches the portal UI, including displayed visualizations, to a dark color set optimized for use in NOCs and other dark-room situations.
• Report an Issue: Opens the Report an Issue dialog, which enables you to let us know about any bugs and other technical issues that you encounter using the portal. The report, which is reviewed by Kentik’s portal development team, includes information about where you are in the portal (what screen) and your user environment (e.g. platform and browser).
  Note: If you are already in a dialog when you report an issue then when you close the report dialog you will return to the page from which you opened the original dialog (rather than back to the dialog itself).
• Knowledge Base: Opens the Kentik KB in a new tab or window (depending on your browser preferences).
• Logout: Logs you out of the portal and takes you to the portal login page.

The main sections of the Kentik portal are covered in the following topics:

• Library
• Data Explorer
• Alerting
• Analytics
• Admin

Note: For a look at the various visualization types supported in the sections of the portal, see Chart View Types.

The portal Library (see Portal Library) is the default starting point for the portal, providing a single environment in which to see and manage (create, edit, categorize, etc.) the following types of views (visualizations of your organization’s network traffic data):

• Dashboard: A page with one or more panels that each display a single view of traffic data (graph, table, or gauge); see Dashboards.
• Saved view: A page with a single view based on a collection of settings saved by the user in Data Explorer; see Saved Views.
• Report: A Kentik-provided page with a single view that addresses a specific use case and provides a curated set of controls for fine-tuning by individual users.
  Note: Reports are coming soon.

Data Explorer is Kentik's primary interface for ad hoc exploration of your organization’s network traffic data (flow records, BGP, SNMP, etc.). The Data Explorer UI enables deep-dive spelunking to investigate both current and forensic issues, with near-instant answers across billions of flow records. Detailed settings are translated into queries that return “views” made up of tables and graphs showing metrics about the traffic on specified devices during a specified timespan.

Kentik’s real-time anomaly detection and alerting system provides the industry’s most sophisticated protection against DDoS attacks while also notifying you of any user-defined condition that could affect the stability and performance of your network. The alerting system is built around policies (see Policy Alert Overview) that define the conditions that will generate a response (notification and/or mitigation). Each policy-based alert includes one or more thresholds for triggering an alarm and specifying the actions that result. Mitigation options include built-in RTBH as well as 3rd-party mitigation from vendors including A10 and Radware.

The Analytics section of the Kentik portal contains a set of pages tailored for specialized inquiries into network traffic:

• Peering: Peering Analytics (pictured below) uses BGP data collected by Kentik to show you, in filterable visualizations and tables, the Autonomous Systems that traffic leaving your network passes through on the way to its destination. Understanding the flow of traffic from your network by AS, device, and geography can help you find prospects for peering relationships and generally improve management of transit costs.
• Route Traffic: Route Traffic Analytics evaluates flow and BGP data to derive the distribution of traffic across routes, which enables you to see how many unique network prefixes (routes) are represented in a given percent of your traffic. The primary use case is to determine the required capacity of your edge routers in terms of the number entries needed in the Forwarding Information Base (a.k.a. FIB, CEF table or IP forwarding table) to meet the forwarding requirements of your network’s traffic.
• Capacity: Capacity Planning provides a quick view of link utilization across the network — filtered to expose the most urgent issues — and projects the date on which, if current trends hold, each interface will reach a user-specified percent of capacity. These capabilities provide integrated insights into network capacity, utilization, performance, and traffic composition, and they enable service providers and other network operators to minimize costs while delivering the best possible service.
• Raw Flow: The Raw Flow page, which enables you to directly examine the values of flow data received from a specific device in a specific time-range, can be used for detailed forensic investigation.
• Query Editor: Query Editor is provided as a place to experiment with and refine SQL queries to your data stored in the tables of the Kentik Data Engine (see the Query SQL Method of the Query API).
  Note: The Query Editor is now deprecated. For additional information, contact Kentik support.

The Admin section of the portal contains the pages used to set up all of the various aspects of your organization’s usage of Kentik, including configuration of the following:

• Devices
• Interfaces
• Sites
• Plans
• Single Sign-on
• Access Control
• Users
• Interface Classification
• Network Classification
• Custom Dimensions
• Saved Filters
• Flow Tags
• Subscriptions