CIO Bulletin

Avi Freedman, CEO of Kentik: A Leading Technologist Helping People Acquire a powerful and affordable Infrastructure Visibility Solution

In today’s digital world, being connected is everything. If packets don’t move, users and customers are impacted and revenue doesn’t flow. If you run your network well, you’re set up for success. Today, identity and privileged access management solutions are not static deployments. Real-world implementations are developed over time and are rooted in traditional enterprise identity and privileged access management. These various generations of deployment (led by new projects, versions, and software changes) make the solutions complex, challenging to maintain, and expensive. Worst of all? They sometimes do not meet all of today’s requirements or address the changing landscape of risks. Identity and access management (IAM) and privileged access management (PAM) are not new approaches, but they need to evolve to address today’s dynamic enterprise environment. By converging identity and access management and privileged access management platforms, and weaving an identity fabric paradigm, you can move towards a more modern and capable identity-based security architecture, reducing complexity while increasing efficiency.

Kentik is the network observability company. The platform is a must-have for the network front line, whether digital business, corporate IT, or service provider. Network professionals turn to the Kentik Network Observability Cloud to plan, run, and fix any network, relying on their infinite granularity, AI-driven insights, and insanely fast search. Kentik makes sense of network, cloud, host, and container flow, internet routing, performance tests, and network metrics. The company shows network pros what they need to know about their network performance, health, and security to make their business-critical services shine. Networks power the world’s most valuable companies, and those companies trust Kentik. With Kentik, you see the entire network picture in one place so you can optimize traffic delivery across every network, including the ones you don’t own.

Designing and Running Large-Scale Networks

Kentik Core: Say goodbye to your swivel chair. See your data center, clouds, and internet in a single view. Explore your network telemetry every which-a-way. Troubleshoot like the wind. Manage traffic, bandwidth, and performance across your WANs and SD-WANs. See the network map connecting your remote offices, branches, and campuses. Detect performance degradation and nip “slow” complaints in the bud. Keep remote workforce productive by observing their VPN traffic, seeing applications and top contributors and detecting policy violations such as large downloads, software updates, and over-the-top services. Make sure network performance is in check, and quickly troubleshoot the issues that impact experience.

Kentik Synthetics: Monitor and manage digital experience based on your actual traffic. Test latency-sensitive applications to the second. Get alerted to problems and investigate with ease all the way up the stack including transactions. You’ll have all the answers you need to ace performance every time. Monitor digital experience across network infrastructure, multiple clouds, SaaS applications, page load and transaction testing. Auto-configure tests based on your actual traffic. Identify where the problem lies, wherever it may be. Be alerted to performance problems and know they’re based on your real traffic patterns. Quickly zoom into specific tests and learn details of your traffic’s path so you can narrow down to the source of problems. Immediately see nodes with excessive latency or packet loss. Monitor BGP events including hijacks and path changes, route leaks and invalid RPKI status.

Kentik Cloud: Mastermind your network to and from, between, and within multiple public clouds. Ace network performance every time. See and drill in to fix issues before they become problems. See all your traffic to sites and multi-cloud regions. Overlay inter-site performance data and health metrics. Cast the map and live updates for your NOC. Drill down into metro markets using infinite canvas visualization. Get a map of your VPCs and the entire topology including gateways and interconnects — in the cloud, between clouds or on-prem. See your traffic to and through the cloud, and add CloudWatch and infrastructure metrics to augment your understanding. Click on anything for in-depth information.

Kentik Edge: Run your edge like a boss. Get a handle on traffic. Wrangle peering, transit, and interconnections. And get the biggest bang for your buck. Discover the origin and destination networks that generate the most traffic to and from your network. Identify peering candidate networks for direct interconnection to offload traffic from paid transit links or saturated interconnections. Optimize your edge. Find peers and interconnect efficiently. See neighboring networks; understand how you exchange traffic, and who you need to connect to. Map contract models onto traffic data to track interconnection costs. Evaluate cost history and progression across any currency and type of connectivity for strategic planning. Stay on top of contract and invoice terms with an integrated calendar view.

Meet the Benevolent Leader behind Kentik's Sucess

Avi Freedman is the CO-FOUNDER and Chief Executive Officer of Kentik. He has decades of experience as a leading technologist and executive in networking. He was with Akamai for over a decade, as VP Network Infrastructure and then Chief Network Scientist. Prior to that, Avi started Philadelphia’s first ISP (netaxs) in 1992, later running the network at AboveNet and serving as CTO for ServerCentral.