Instant graph-ification

Sometimes you just want something now! Look, I appreciate that some things take time but in the fast paced world of technology sometimes I need it now! Like yesterday!

In the world of network visibility there are new solutions in development that promise greater insight, greater visibility, predictive analytics and so on but is visibility really the issue? Or is our ability to consume the data we already have more the issue? The problem is really twofold so what is being done to solve this issue?

From experience, gaining network visibility especially for replay of events usually involves running several time consuming reports. The way in which we troubleshoot irregular operations today often leads to much delay in resolution. Using what we’ll just refer to as an ‘exotic seven figure tool’ I have personally waited as long as 30 minutes to build connection table for replay of events.

I was recently highly impressed with a presentation by one of the vendors at Network Field Day 12, Kentik. In summary, what I perceive that Kentik has built is a highly optimized big data back end which is capable of consuming, organizing and presenting the data in near real-time fashion. Kentik continually injests data from data sources such as NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, SNMP and BGP and can return a wealth of data based on this information in near real time for the last 90 days or longer!

Check out the following data analysis video for more detail.

In short, I was highly impressed and I believe that tools like this are going to be critical as the complexity and volume of data that operators need to sort through is only going to continue to increase.

If you are like me trying to deal with managing complex infrastructures with little to no downtime I need more data, more often, more readily accessible. I need it all and I need it now! If so Kentik is definately worth taking a look at.

Disclaimer: I don’t get paid to write any of this stuff, I just get to hang out with a lot of really smart people for a week which is worth a lot so … assume what you want.