End-to-End Network Performance Monitoring

Kentik delivers network performance monitoring as part of a unified network intelligence platform — combining SNMP and streaming telemetry from devices, flow data from on-premises and cloud environments, synthetic monitoring from globally distributed agents, BGP routing context, and Kubernetes pod-level visibility in one platform. Rather than stitching together separate tools for traffic analysis, device monitoring, and synthetic testing, teams investigate performance issues from a single workflow with shared context across every layer. For an in-depth look at the NPM category itself, see What is Network Performance Monitoring? in Kentipedia.

A modern multi-vendor NPM solution should ingest telemetry from any device that produces it (SNMP, sFlow, NetFlow, IPFIX, gNMI streaming telemetry, VPC and VNet flow logs), support hybrid and multicloud environments without separate tools for each, provide synthetic monitoring from globally distributed agents, surface routing and internet-path context (BGP, AS path, peering data), and offer AI-driven investigation that explains why performance changed rather than only that it changed. Kentik supports all of these capabilities in a single SaaS platform. For a deeper comparison across the NPM tool landscape, see Best Network Monitoring Tools 2026.

Kentik ingests each telemetry type into a unified data platform that enriches every record at ingest with BGP, geographic, application, and business-context metadata. SNMP and streaming telemetry capture device health and interface metrics; flow data (NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, VPC/VNet/VCN flow logs) captures traffic patterns; synthetic monitoring measures path performance from any location; BGP feeds provide internet routing context. Because all of this data lives in one place with shared identifiers (IPs, ASNs, applications, time ranges), engineers can pivot between views without losing context — looking at a device alert, drilling into the flows traversing that device, then checking synthetic test results along the affected path in a single workflow.

Alert fatigue typically comes from threshold-based rules that fire on noise rather than meaningful change. Kentik addresses this through multiple mechanisms: dynamic baselining that learns normal traffic patterns per dimension (per-application, per-region, per-customer), AI-driven anomaly detection that distinguishes routine variation from genuine issues, and Kentik AI Advisor for evidence-backed investigation that produces actionable verdicts rather than raw alerts. The result is fewer false-positive alerts and richer context on the alerts that do fire — including suggested next steps and the underlying data behind each verdict.

The fastest path to latency root cause requires three capabilities working together: synthetic tests that isolate where in the path latency originates (which hop, which AS, which region), flow data that confirms how much real traffic is affected, and routing context that explains whether a BGP change or peering issue is responsible. Kentik supports this by running ping and traceroute tests continuously from global and customer-deployed agents, correlating results with flow and BGP data, and surfacing the analysis through Kentik AI Advisor — which can investigate a latency complaint end-to-end and return an evidence-backed root cause in minutes rather than hours.

End-to-end QoS validation requires comparing policy intent (which traffic should be marked, queued, and prioritized in which way) with observed behavior across every hop in the path. Kentik supports this by ingesting flow records that include DSCP markings, correlating them with device-level interface and queue metrics from SNMP and streaming telemetry, and running synthetic tests with controlled traffic to verify that prioritization works as configured. Teams use this combination to detect QoS misconfigurations, identify where prioritization breaks down across multi-vendor or hybrid networks, and validate that critical voice or video traffic is actually getting the treatment it’s supposed to.

Multi-vendor NPM works only when the telemetry ingest is genuinely vendor-agnostic — supporting standard protocols (SNMP, NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, gNMI) and vendor-specific extensions without requiring different tools for different equipment. Kentik supports network devices from all major vendors (Cisco, Arista, Juniper, Nokia, and others) through a unified data model, plus cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI) and Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE, OKE) through cloud-native ingestion paths. Distributed teams operating across data centers, branches, and cloud regions get a single view of performance regardless of which vendor or environment any particular link runs on.

Traditional network monitoring tools focus primarily on device health and threshold-based alerting — useful for on-premises infrastructure, less suited to the cloud, internet, and SaaS questions that drive most modern incidents. Kentik is built as a network intelligence platform: SaaS-delivered, AI-assisted, and designed to unify on-premises, multicloud, internet, and synthetic data in one place. For most teams, the question isn’t “Kentik vs. traditional NPM” but “which combination covers our actual investigation needs” — some organizations run Kentik alongside SolarWinds or LogicMonitor for specific use cases. For a fuller comparison across the NPM landscape, see Best Network Monitoring Tools 2026.