Edge Overview

The Edge section of the Kentik V4 portal is covered in the following topics:

• About Edge
• Edge Modules

The Edge section of the Kentik V4 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).

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

• Connectivity Costs: Connectivity Costs helps you understand how traffic entering or exiting external interfaces (e.g. transit and/or peering) impacts your operational costs. This information can be valuable in the following ways:
  - 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: This module 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. See Traffic Engineering.
• Peering & Interconnection: Peering (directly connecting one network to another) has two main advantages over purchasing transit from providers: it cuts your costs and may also increase end-user performance by reducing transmission and processing delays. Our peering analytics suite helps you find peering opportunities by understanding the ultimate destination of the traffic you send via paid links as well as the source of traffic sent to you via paid links. It allows you to define dynamic blacklists of networks you already know you won't be able to peer with, as well to be alerted when traffic that could enter or leave via a peering connection is instead routed over paid interfaces. See Discover Peers.