Portal Overview

This article provides a basic introduction to the Kentik v4 portal:

• Portal Sections
• Portal Page Structure
• Portal Help and Support
• Portal Data Views
• Portal View Sharing
• Portal Export Options
• Portal Search
• Portal Keyboard Shortcuts

Notes:
- For information on browser support and login procedures for the v4 portal, see Kentik Portals.
- For information about the v3 portal (deprecated) see v3 Portal.

The Kentik V4 portal is structured as a set of sections that are each made up of a series of modules, some of which are referred to as “workflows.” With the exception of the Settings section, the modules are each designed to help you efficiently access information related to a specific networking use case. The following sections are available when you open the main menu:

• Featured: Direct links from the leftmost column of the main menu for a set of the most popular areas of the portal, including Observation Deck, Kentik Map, Settings, Alerting, Library, and My Kentik Portal (see Featured Overview).
• Core: Modules relating to the day-to-day operation of your network in environments such as cloud, data center, WAN, and/or campus, including the physical and virtual devices that make up your network, and on which network traffic enters, traverses, and leaves your network. These modules include Network Explorer, Data Explorer, Capacity Planning, Insights, and Raw Flow Explorer. See Core Overview.
• Synthetics: Kentik's Synthetics workflows enable you to continuously monitor network performance so you can uncover and correct issues before they impact customer experience. This proactive testing is enabled by Kentik software agents (ksynth), including both public agents (available to all Kentik customers) and private agents (available only to your organization). The ping and traceroute tests performed with these agents generate key metrics (latency, jitter, and loss) that are evaluated for network health and performance. See Synthetics Overview.
• Edge: Modules that enable Ops/Engineering to understand both network utilization and costs related to traffic coming from or going to external networks. See Edge Overview.
• Protect: Modules for security use cases, enabling you to defend your network, including detecting anomalies and responding against DDoS and other threats. See Protect Overview.
• Service Provider: Modules that enable communications service providers (CSPs) to understand requirements and performance related to services they provide to customers and subscribers. See Service Provider Overview.
• Cloud: Modules that help you manage public and hybrid cloud networking by enabling you to see the structure of and traffic on cloud resources, to proactively evaluate and troubleshoot performance, and to anticipate and minimize costs. See Cloud Overview.
• Discover: Direct links on the far right of the main menu, including:
  - Knowledge Base: A link to this KB.
  - Product Blog: Links to Kentik’s product updates with the latest features and improvements made to our platform.
  - Integrations: Links to pages that enable you to set up Kentik to work with external systems (see Integrations). Integrations are available across a wide variety of categories, including DDoS Mitigation Platforms, SSO Platforms, Notification Channels, Operations, and Network Platforms.
  - Demo Environment: A standalone Kentik environment where users can work through short, hands-on tutorials in order to experience the core features of our product.
  - API Tester: Test the V6 API by calling its methods using data from your own Kentik account. See APIs Overview.

The basic structure of most portal pages is covered in the following topics:

• Portal Page Layout
• Portal NavBar
• Portal SubNav

The main elements of the V4 portal layout are basically similar across most (but not all) pages:

• NavBar: The black horizontal strip at top includes a set of elements that provide links to important portal functions (see Portal NavBar).
• SubNav: The silver horizontal strip below the navbar includes UI elements that vary depending on the page (see Portal SubNav).
• Main content: The main content area displays page components such as visualizations, tables, controls, and sidebars. These components vary widely depending on the current page.

The portal's main navbar includes the following controls:

• Menu button (hamburger icon): Click to open the main menu, which allows you to navigate to all of the main modules/workflows of the portal (see Portal Sections).
• Kentik logo: Click to return the landing page that you’ve designated as your default on the User-specific Defaults page of your User Profile.
• Search (magnifying glass icon): A link that opens the Search overlay, where you can enter text to search for it in the portal (see Portal Search).
• Product Updates: A link that opens the Product Updates popup, which is a sidebar containing a list of the latest changes to the portal and other aspects of the Kentik product. Click Subscribe to open a pop-up where you can subscribe to product updates by email, Slack, or RSS. A filter field at the top of the sidebar filters the listed items to those matching the entered text.
• Help and Support: A link that opens the Help and Support popup (see Portal Help and Support).
• Organization Settings (building icon): A link that drops down a menu of organization-wide settings (see Organization Settings).
• User menu (user icon): A link that drops down a menu of user-specific settings and offers the ability to log out of the Kentik portal. See User Menu.

Note: in addition to the settings made on the Organization Settings menu and the User menu, a wide array of settings are accessed via the Settings page (see Settings Overview).

The silver horizontal strip below the navbar includes the following UI elements:

• Breadcrumbs: Indicates where you are in the portal and includes links that let you change level.
• Page-specific buttons: A set of menus found in the SubNav of many but not all portal modules. These menus provide access to actions that are specific to a given page, such as refreshing the page's data, sharing the page's content, creating a dashboard panel or saved view from the page, or adjusting query parameters that determine the results shown on the page. For more information about certain menus, see the KB article for that specific page.

Note: A number of module landing pages have no SubNav, including Observation Deck, Alerting, and Library.

The Help and Support popup opens from the question mark icon in the main portal navbar. The popup includes two main panes that direct you to information and support:

• Check our Knowledge Base: A link to the KB topic or article that we think is most likely to help you to understand and use the settings and features on the page at your current location (URL) in the portal.
• Submit a Support Request: A form that you can fill out to pass along bug reports, feature requests, and general suggestions or observations, and a link that you can click to track your support requests in our support portal at https://support.kentik.com (which opens in a new tab).

To submit a request from the popup:

1. In the Summary field, briefly state the reason for your support request (i.e. what you are asking for help with or about).
2. With the Type dropdown, choose the type of support request (ask a question, report a bug, or ask for training).
3. In the Additional Details field, give a more detailed description of specifically what you are asking about and, if it's a bug, what we would do to reproduce it.
4. Click the Submit button.

One of the major goals of the V4 portal is to surface valuable information about your network right out of the box, without requiring you to configure pages to present information that's relevant to your operation. With that in mind, we include a variety of ready-made view types and ways to access them:

• Observation Deck: A user-configurable high-level view of your organization's network that features visualizations (a.k.a. "widgets") that each focus on a specific aspect of your traffic volume, performance, costs, connectivity, or utilization. See Observation Deck.
• Kentik Map: A visualization of your network infrastructure, both on-prem and cloud, that enables fast understanding of how components are interconnected and how that affects traffic patterns, network health, and performance, including application delivery and customer experience (see Kentik Map).
• Library: A collection of both Kentik-provided and custom instances of the following types of views (see Library):
  - Dashboard: A page with one or more panels that each display a single representation (graph, table, gauge, map) of query results.
  - Saved View: A page with one Data Explorer view that has been saved for later reuse.
• Network Explorer: A multi-level view of the current traffic on your network:
  - Network Explorer landing page: A high-level overview that includes breakdowns by direction, by individual sites and clouds, and by dimensions (such as applications, devices, etc.). See Network Explorer.
  - Network Explorer aggregate pages: A complete picture of an entire class of traffic that is defined by a specific parameter (e.g. data source, dimension, or cloud provider). See Core Aggregate Pages.
  - Network Explorer details pages: A detailed picture of one individual instance of a class of traffic (e.g. a data source, a dimension, or a cloud provider). See Core Details Pages.
• Synthetics: Easily set up, manage, and view data from ping and traceroute testing (both your own infrastructure and the cloud), guided and augmented by your actual network traffic data (see Synthetics Modules).
• Cloud: A collection of pages providing a high-level overview of various aspects of your cloud traffic and infrastructure (see Cloud Modules).
• Landing pages: Many of the individual modules/workflows in the Edge, Protect, and Service Provider sections of the portal are designed such that when you go to the landing page you see key information, similar to what you would see on a dashboard, and you can configure the view to customize what information is displayed and how it is arranged. For further information, see the KB articles on the following individual modules:
  - Insights
  - Capacity Planning
  - Discover Peers
  - Connectivity Costs
  - Traffic Engineering
  - DDoS Defense
  - OTT Service Tracking
  - CDN Analytics
  - Market Intelligence (also called KMI)

Our synthetic testing section enables you to easily set up, manage, and view data from ping and traceroute testing, involving both your own infrastructure and the cloud, guided and augmented by your actual network traffic data (see Synthetics Overview):

• Synthetics Dashboard: The Synthetics Dashboard provides a summary overview of the health status of your tests, as well as information on the agents deployed and the consumption of test credits.
• Test Control Center: The Test Control Center is used to manage your organization's synthetic tests and to drill down into the details of subtest results.
• Agent Management: The Agent Management page lets you see all currently deployed agents, global and private, and manage your organization’s agents.
• BGP Route Viewer: The BGP Route Viewer displays BGP events involving one or more ASNs or IP prefixes that your organization has chosen to monitor, enabling you to correlate issues revealed by synthetic testing at the network and web layers with issues at the routing layer (BGP).
• State of the Internet: The State of the Internet provides at-a-glance visibility into the health, performance, and availability of common public applications, services, clouds, and networks that may impact your applications, networks, and services.

A collection of pages providing a high-level overview of various aspects of your cloud traffic and infrastructure (see Cloud Overview). These include:

• Kentik Kube: Currently in Beta, the Kentik Kube provides detailed network traffic and performance observability that enables cloud and infrastructure engineers to quickly detect and solve network problems in and around Kubernetes clusters.
• Traffic Overviews (AWS, GCP, and Azure): These are Kentik-provided Dashboards for your Kentik-monitored resources in AWS, GCP, and Azure. See Cloud Traffic Overviews.
• Performance Monitor: The Cloud Performance Monitor enables cloud network engineers to easily view the critical cloud paths between AWS and on-prem infrastructure as well as to monitor the performance of those links.
• Connectivity Checker: Currently in Beta, the Connectivity Checker workflow analyzes cloud metadata collected from Kentik-monitored AWS cloud environments and inventories subnets, instances, and VPCs to determine how they communicate.

The v4 portal’s options for sharing views with others are covered in the following topics:

• About View Sharing
• Sharing by Link
• Sharing by Email
• Sharing by Subscription
• Sharable Views

Kentik supports a number of different ways to share with others what you’re currently seeing in the portal. Some of these methods require the recipient to be a registered Kentik user who’s within your organization, while others enable you to share with persons outside of your organization who may not be Kentik users.

Note: While the Share menu is implemented on most portal pages, not all sharing options described below are available on those pages.

The following methods of sharing the current view are accessed from the Share dialog, which you access via the Share menu in the SubNav (see Portal Page Layout):

• Link: Sharing options from the Link tab of the dialog (see Sharing by Link):
  - Internal share: Copy a URL of the view that you can pass along to other Kentik users within your organization (see Internal Share Link).
  - Public share: Save the view to a publicly accessible web page that can be viewed by people who aren’t Kentik users, inside or outside of your organization (see Public Share Link).
• Email: Send the current view as a report that’s attached as a PDF or CSV file (see Sharing by Email).
• Subscription: Send the view on a scheduled, recurring basis as a PDF or CSV file attached to an email (see Sharing by Subscription). On some pages, you can also click the Actions menu in the SubNav to Subscribe.

In addition to Kentik’s built-in features for sharing via link, email, or subscription, you can also download the information from some portal modules and then share it yourself. Use the Actions menu in the SubNav (see Portal Page Layout) to download a file representing the view (see Portal Export Options), after which you can share that file with others using any communication method such as email or Slack.

The Link tab of the Share dialog enables two types of link sharing, which are covered in the topics below.

An internal share is a URL that may be used by other Kentik-registered users in your own organization. To get the link:

1. In the SubNav, click the Share button to open the Share dialog.
2. In the Internal Share pane at the top of the Link tab, click the Copy Link button. The URL of the current view will be copied to the clipboard.
3. Paste the link into an email, Slack, or some other form of communication to share it with a colleague within your organization.

A public share is a publicly accessible web page that can be viewed by people inside or outside of your organization, who aren’t Kentik users (see About Public Shares). In the portal modules listed in Sharable Views, public shares are configured in the Public Share pane of the Link tab of the Share dialog.

The form in the Public Share pane is made up of the following UI elements:

• Manage Public Shares: A link that takes you to the portal’s settings page for Public Shares.
• Title: Enter a name for the public share. This may already be populated with the name of the page you’re sharing, but change it as needed.
• Description: Describe to the people with whom you'll be sharing the link why you are sharing this view with them and what they should look for, including relevant timestamps, incident details, etc.
• Share Link: A field showing the link for the page on which visitors will be able to see this public share. The last segment of the link will be pre-populated based on what you enter into the Title field, but you can modify this segment as desired (the segment will be validated for HTTP compliance).
• Recipients: A comma-separated list of addresses (within or outside of your organization) to which you'd like Kentik to send an email with a link to this public share.
• Message: The text of the email in which the link will be sent.
• Cancel: Click to close the Share dialog without sharing a public share.
• Share: Click to send an email message with the public share link to the specified recipients.

Notes:
- The above form also exists in the Link dialog that opens from the Edit button (pencil icon) in the Public Shares list (see Link Dialog). The Link dialog version doesn’t include the Recipient or Message fields.
- Before creating a public share, be sure that the information in the shared visualization is appropriate for viewing by the public with no authentication.

To create and send a public share:

1. In the SubNav, click the Share button to open the Share dialog.
2. In the Public Share pane at the bottom of the Link tab, specify the settings covered in Public Share Link.
3. Click Share to send an email message containing the link to people who aren’t Kentik users.

Sharing by email means creating a report that Kentik will send as an attachment to a specified list of recipients. Email sharing is initiated from the Email tab of the Share dialog.

The Email tab of the Share dialog includes the following UI elements:

• Subject: The subject line for the email that will include the shared report.
• Share: The kind of view that you’d like to share (see Sharable Views).
  Note: The type of page from which you clicked the Share button limits the types of reports you can share. For example, if you clicked Share on a Dashboard page, you will only be able to send a Dashboard report.
• Selected view: A list of views of the kind specified with the Share setting. Choose the view from which you’d like to create a report to send via email.
  Note: This setting is present only when there is more than one available view of the kind selected with the Share setting.
• Report File Type: Depending on the kind of view specified with the Share setting, you may be able to choose the file type of the report.
• Recipients: A comma-separated list of addresses (internal or external) to which to email the report.
• Message: The body of the email.
• Cancel: Click to close the Share dialog without sending an email.
• Share: Click to send an email message with the attached report to the specified recipients.

To share by email:

1. In the SubNav, click the Share button to open the Share dialog.
2. In the Email tab, specify the settings covered in Email Tab UI.
3. Click the Share button to send the report as an attachment to the specified recipients.

Sharing by subscription is very similar to sharing by email but instead of being sent only once, the view is shared on a recurring basis. A report is created from the view at a specified interval and sent to the same recipient(s) each time. Subscription sharing can be initiated:

• From the Subscription tab of the Share dialog;
• By selecting Subscribe from the Actions menu;
• By selecting Add Subscription on the Subscriptions page.

Note: The only way to create an alert subscription from the Alerting page is to click Actions » Subscribe.

The Subscription tab of the Share dialog includes the following settings and controls:

• Manage Subscriptions: A link that takes you to the portal’s settings page for Subscriptions.
• Subscription: A drop-down in which you can do one of the following:
  - Click Create New to show a field into which you can enter the name of the new subscription. Click Cancel (beside the field) to select a subscription rather than create one (this will also clear any fields on the dialog you’ve filled out).
  - Choose an existing subscription from a drop-down list, which enables you to add a recipient (yourself or someone else) to the distribution list or to modify the other properties of a report.
  Note: Modifying the content of a subscription will change it not only for you but for all recipients.
• Share: The kind of view that you are about to share (see Sharable Views).
  Note: The type of page from which you clicked the Share button limits the types of reports you can share. For example, if you clicked Share on a Dashboard page, you will only be able to send a Dashboard report.
• Selected View: A list of views of the kind specified with the Share setting. Choose the view from which you’d like to create a report to send via email.
  Notes:
  - This setting is present only when there is more than one available view of the kind selected with the Share setting.
  - Certain kinds of views allow you to select more than one view in the Selected View field. Once selected, these will display as lozenges inside the field.
• Report File Name: A file name for the report. To include the date the report is sent, use YYYYMMDD at the beginning of the file name.
• Report File Type: Depending on the kind of view specified with the Share setting, you may be able to choose the file type of the report (PDF, CSV, etc.).
• Recipients: Three fields (To, CC, and BCC) in which you can use a comma-separated list of addresses (internal or external) to which to email the report. At least one of these fields must be populated with a minimum of one email address in order to share the report.
• Schedule: The interval at which the report will be updated and sent: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or the Last day of the month.
• On (day): Appears only if Schedule is set to Weekly or Monthly:
  - If Weekly, the day of the week to run the scheduled report;
  - If Monthly, the day of the month to run the scheduled report.
• Lookback: The date-span in days, back from the day the report is sent, to include in the report (cannot be a number greater than 90). The default is 7 days.
  Note: This setting is shown only when Share is set to Dashboard or Saved View.
• Filters (alerts only): All Alerts List Filters from the Alerting page are also available in the Subscription dialog (see Subscription Tab Filters).

To share by subscription:

1. In the SubNav, either:
   - Click the Share button to open the Share dialog and select the Subscriptions tab, or
   - Click the Actions button and select Subscribe.
2. Specify the settings covered in Subscription Tab UI.
3. Click the Share or Subscribe button to send the report as an attachment to the specified recipients on a recurring basis at the specified interval.

All filter controls from the Alerting page (see Alerts List Filters) are also available in the Subscribe dialog. These include:

• Clear all: Click to return all filters to their default settings.
• Time Range (UTC): Select a lookback time range for the subscription.
• Status: Only report alerts with the selected status(es): Ack Required, Alarm, or Cleared.
• Severity: Only report on alerts with the selected severities: Critical, Severe, Major, Warning, or Minor.
• Type: Only report on certain types of alerts: DDoS, Query-Based, or Custom.
• Alert ID: Only report on alerts for the specified alert ID (text box).
• Policy Names: Select one or more policies that you want reported on.
• Show Tenant Alerts: Display or hide tenant alerts for the report.
• Tenants (appears only when Show Tenant Alerts is enabled): A drop-down from which you can select the tenants on whom you want to report.
• Dimension Search: Narrow the report to alerts in which a dimension in the key definition matches the entered text.
• Exact Match: A switch that determines whether the string entered in the Dimension Search field is matched strictly or loosely.

The views that are currently sharable by one or more sharing methods are listed in the table below.

Note: For any module where you can share a subscription, you can also create a subscription from the Subscriptions page. For RPKI Analysis and the Traffic Trends & Overview modules, you must select Dashboard from the Share drop-down and then choose the desired module from the list in the Selected Dashboard drop-down.

Many views in the various modules of the Kentik portal can be downloaded for viewing outside the portal or for sharing with others. Downloads are implemented as export options from the Actions menu in the SubNav (see Portal Page Layout). Export options vary depending on the module.

The following export types are supported:

• Visual Reports:
  - Chart + Data Table: A single PDF containing both the visualization and the results table (which functions as the chart’s legend).
  - Chart image: The visualization only, exported as a PNG.
  - Chart vector: The visualization only, exported as an SVG.
• Data:
  - Chart Data: Export, as CSV, the data represented in the chart.
  - Data Table: Export, as CSV, the data in the table.

You can review your recently exported views by choosing Recent Exports from the portal navbar's User Menu, which takes you to the Recent Exports page.

The portal’s search functionality is implemented as an overlay that you open from the magnifying glass icon in the main navbar. In its initial state, the overlay includes the following elements:

• Close: Click the X in the upper right corner to close the overlay.
• Search: A field in which you enter the text on which to search.
• Try searching for: A list of categories of network entities that gives the properties on which you can search. The properties vary depending on the category.

As you enter text in the Search field, the search engine starts looking for matches in the listed categories, and the Try searching for list is replaced with a list of results. The list is structured as a table with each result (along with details that vary depending on the category) on the left and the result’s category on the right. The Show field above the results list includes a blue button for each category in which there is a result; click on a button to toggle off/on the display of results for that category.

Also located above the results list, on the right, is an orange See KB Results button that will open Kentik’s Knowledge Base (KB) in a new tab and show, in the Search Results page for the v4 KB, the results returned from searching the v4 KB for the string entered in the portal’s Search field. Each result is a link to one topic in the KB where the string was found. Use the tabs to switch to the KB results for Platform, V4 portal, or the (deprecated) v3 Portal.

The Kentik v4 portal includes keyboard shortcuts (global hotkeys) for the commands in the table below.