BiB 066: Why Cloud Visibility Matters - a podcast by Packet Pushers Interactive LLC

The following is a transcript of the audio recording you can listen to in the player above.
Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s December 6, 2018, and cloud visibility is on my mind.
Application Architecture Complexity
Imagine a complex application. There are multiple parts to it. A web farm behind a load balancer on the front end. A firewall or two. Probably some database calls. And then the stuff we tend to forget about like authentication and domain name services. Okay, you’re with me so far.
Now let’s make this more complex by splitting the web app into elastic microservices living in the public cloud. At least, part of the app lives in the public cloud, because an AWS bill shows up every month. Part of the app also lives on-premises. You think. Which is the problem. It’s actually getting hard to tell what is going on with this app, as the developers aren’t always in lock step with the operations team about what they’ve deployed where, and the architecture team just points you to a reference document…that is full of lies.
You shake your head that no one seems to know what’s going on. Business as usual. And then on a fateful day, the help desk tickets start piling up. The app performance has gone down the toilet, much like your hopes for a lunch outside the office, and no one seems to know why. Must be the network. Or the cloud. Or that Kubernetes thing. Or something.
Data Visualization With Kentik
What’s an infrastructure engineer to do? You need visibility. A few weeks ago, I had a briefing with Kentik. Their mission in life is to collect infrastructure data and help you gain meaningful insights from it. I’m not talking about stacks of RRD graphs that look cool while communicating almost nothing. Rather, Kentik shows how data relates to other data in an intuitive way that helps you make decisions or solve problems.
Let me give you an example. One of their core use cases has been helping service providers and Internet exchange points understand how data is flowing through their network. Who sent them this data? Where is this data going next? Oh, AS 12345 is sending us data for AS 54321, but it’s costing us a ton of money because it’s traversing our link to AS 31416. Maybe we should create a peering relationship with AS 54321 directly and stop running up our bill to AS 31416.
That’s just one example. In the latest demo I’ve seen, Kentik has applied their visualization and analysis to cloud traffic, helping IT teams understand the flows that are happening between services that make up an application.
Kentik Cloud Visibility
Kentik works by ingesting data. Massive amounts of netflow and other sorts of records from your network and endpoints. For cloud visibility use cases, Kentik is able to absorb AWS & GCP flow logs, with Azure support coming soon. Kubernetes for container orchestration and Istio for service mesh control are also data providers to Kentik, among many other data providers. These are added to the host level instrumentation and network device data Kentik has been able to gather since it came on the scene a few years back.
In the briefing I attended, Crystal Li, Senior Product Marketing Manager with Kentik pointed out, “We consume the tag and label information which contains the information about your infrastructure, your service mapping, and your user information.”
Which is quite granular indeed. When Kentik has ingested & analyzed the information, results, alarms and actions can be handed off to third party providers as complex as ServiceNow or PagerDuty, and as simple as JSON you bring into a tool of your choosing.
Let’s bring this back to our opening hypothetical situ…

Further episodes of Tech Bytes

Further podcasts by Packet Pushers Interactive LLC

Website of Packet Pushers Interactive LLC