Announcing Complete Azure Observability for Kentik Cloud

Today, the phrase “cloud migration” means a lot more than it used to – gone are the days of the simple lift and shift. Kentik customers move workloads to (and from) multiple clouds, integrate existing hybrid applications with new cloud services, migrate to Virtual WAN to secure private network traffic, and make on-premises data and applications redundant to multiple clouds – or cloud data and applications redundant to the data center.

These strategies bring fresh challenges to teams working in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including:

• Optimizing resource allocation to reduce cost
• Maintaining consistent operations using diverse platforms, APIs, networking configurations, and security models
• Integrating multiple clouds with on-premises infrastructure and legacy systems
• Managing data across diverse storage systems with strong and compliant data governance that ensures consistency, integrity, and privacy

At Kentik, we help infrastructure, network, and cloud engineering teams meet those challenges head-on. To that end, we’re excited to announce major updates to Kentik Cloud that will make your teams more efficient (and happier) in multi-cloud. Today, we’re unveiling Kentik Map for Azure and extensive support for Microsoft Azure infrastructure within the Kentik platform. With this release, your teams can:

• Reference live visualizations of Azure infrastructure topology in Kentik Map for Azure, with both current and historical views of paths and detailed metadata
• Quickly understand path and performance details of traffic routes that connect Microsoft Azure workloads to data centers across Azure Express Routes
• Visualize and interrogate traffic across Azure Firewalls, Load Balancers, Application Gateways, and other network infrastructure
• Visualize and interrogate all branch, VPN, private cloud, and intra-cloud connectivity that is connected with Azure VWAN
• Drill into the impact of NSG (Network Security Group) configuration on security and productivity with live traffic data
• Use custom tags to add any custom context to Microsoft Azure data along with pre-built Azure-native attributes sourced from Azure APIs
• Create custom dashboards with configurable pre-built widgets to visualize important Azure cost and performance trends

The complexity of moving things between cloud and on-premises to meet cost, customer experience, regulatory, and security requirements is here to stay. Network and infrastructure teams need the ability to rapidly answer any question about their networks to resolve incidents, understand tradeoffs, and make great decisions at scale. Kentik’s comprehensive network observability, spanning all of your multi-cloud deployments, is a critical tool for meeting these challenges.

Purpose-built for Azure

Kentik Map now visualizes Azure infrastructure in an interactive, data- and context-rich map highlighting how resources nest within each other and connect to on-prem environments. We designed this new map specifically around Azure hybrid cloud architectural patterns in response to the needs of some of our largest enterprise customers. It includes rich metrics for understanding the volume, path, business context, and performance of flows traveling through Azure network infrastructure.

Live traffic flow arrows demonstrate how Azure Express Routes, Firewalls, Load Balancers, Application Gateways, and VWANs connect in the Kentik Map, which updates dynamically as topology changes for effortless architecture reference. When it comes to data, the Kentik Map for Azure surfaces hard-to-find health, usage, and utilization metrics for these Azure-native resources based on what matters most for each, including information about CPU utilization, route change frequency, bit and packet receipt rates, failed request counts, latency, port utilization, throughput, data processed, and more as it is available. For example, Express Route metrics include data about inbound and outbound dropped packets.

Kentik Map for Azure makes denied traffic easily discoverable from each subnet visualized. Beyond the Map, Azure data sources such as NSG (Network Security Group) and Firewall flow logs are now deeply integrated into all of Kentik Cloud to power Azure-aware hybrid and multi-cloud investigations with easy correlation of NSGs and Firewalls to other Azure networking resources.

Why do you need complete network telemetry?

Kentik now collects, analyzes, and contextualizes traffic flow and performance data from all major public clouds – from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS services – along with data from on-premises networks. Kentik enriches all this network telemetry with deep application, business, and security context to provide observability across all hybrid and multi-cloud environments that you can use to make smart decisions faster. It also provides custom alerts and synthetic testing for each environment, including Azure.

Engineering teams use this unified telemetry to automate insights across the networks they own, like data centers and corporate IT systems, and the networks they don’t, like cloud software deployments and backups. This improves investigation efficiency by reducing time spent context-switching across tools and manually extracting data and insights. Complete network telemetry also prevents critical security, policy, and performance data from falling through the cracks.

Only Kentik Cloud provides this complete telemetry, and we will continue to rapidly expand the platform’s capabilities to help our customers optimize performance, resolve network incidents, reduce cloud costs, and maximize ROI from both acquired and migrated workloads.

To learn more, visit our Azure page, and check out the Azure video library for more scenario-based demos of all things Azure in Kentik Cloud. Ready to observe your networks? Try Kentik free for 30 days, or contact our team for a personalized tour.