For decades, network performance has been measured in terms of speed, reliability, and security. But for service providers, there’s another metric that can make or break the business: cost. Calculating the true financial impact of every gigabyte moving across a network has long been an exercise in frustration—fragmented data, inconsistent billing, and outdated spreadsheets. Kentik’s new Traffic Costs feature aims to change that.

Jezzibell Gilmore, GM of Service Provider at Kentik, describes it as an industry first. “There’s incredible complexity,” she explained. “Billing, data fragmentation, global variability—every provider calculates differently. It’s almost impossible to know what a single customer costs you in a given region or globally.”

Kentik solves this by pulling together existing network data, normalizing it, and enabling real-time analysis by region, ASN, customer, and traffic path. Gilmore noted that when she managed networks in the past, it could take six months for finance and engineering teams to piece together partial answers from invoices and logs. By the time the reports arrived, the data was already outdated.

This is more than a technical improvement. Gilmore believes it will change how teams work. “It’s sometimes the culture that’s stopping the innovation. Having the ability to analyze all of this data for better decision-making will fundamentally change the way service providers do business,” she said. Finance and engineering teams can finally collaborate with a common set of insights, turning cost visibility into strategy.

That strategy extends beyond saving money. By identifying where peering relationships or direct interconnections could lower costs and improve performance, providers can adjust their network design in real time. They can also use the insights to prioritize higher-margin customers, adopt customer-first pricing, and build new value-added services on top of foundational traffic.

Gilmore frames it as a shift in business philosophy: “If you’re bringing value to your customers, not only will they stay loyal, but they’ll continue to build their business with you. We want to help customers not just improve margins but expand their business through deep understanding of their traffic flows.”

For an industry that has long accepted cost opacity as inevitable, Kentik’s Traffic Costs feature opens a new frontier. It’s not just about observability—it’s about profitability. And it positions data-driven decision-making at the heart of how networks grow.