Today’s infrastructure is considerably more complex than 25 years ago with engineers often finding themselves swamped in data. In this video, Phillip Gervasi, Director of Technical Evangelism at Kentik, talks about how the company is using generative AI to help engineers and he gives us a demo of Kentik’s platform. He says, “The application of generative AI today only augments an engineer to facilitate an easier, more efficient data analysis, something that is near impossible for a single person to do.”

AI for network operations and Observability

• Gervasi gives us an overview of Kentik and how it is helping engineers get a clear picture of what is happening in the network in real time and historically to help with predictive analysis, root-cause analysis, and troubleshooting.

Generative AI and its applications in data analysis

• Gervasi discusses the differences between generative AI and general AI, explaining that generative AI can summarize, predict, and interpret the intent of human language, enabling new ways of interacting with data.
• Engineers can use natural language to query large language models (LLMs) on an underlying database for faster and more efficient troubleshooting.

Improving application delivery and accuracy with AI

• Gervasi talks about how generative AI can be used for troubleshooting mission-critical infrastructure.
• Gervasi highlights the criticality of network infrastructure for various industries, including emergency services, hospitals, businesses, and schools, and the need for faster and more efficient application delivery.

Leveraging generative AI in IT operations

• The infrastructure in today’s digital world is significantly more complex and operational teams are overwhelmed by the amount of data.
• Gervasi explains how generative AI helps augment engineers by facilitating more efficient data analysis and reducing the burden of manual work.
• Gervasi does not believe AI is taking people’s jobs but is making it easier to deal with large volumes of data in various formats that engineers must deal with today.

Using AI to simplify network monitoring and analysis

• Gervasi demonstrates how Kentik uses generative AI to facilitate engineers’ queries and data more easily by entering simple human language prompts and adding different criteria to the filter to get the desired results.
• Gervasi explains how Kentik uses generative AI to integrate the data and abstract away data formats and types, allowing users to easily view and analyze network monitoring data in a single database.
• Gervasi shows us Kentik’s Network Monitoring System (NMS) and how generative AI can be used to get real-time data and metrics about utilization.
• Using generative AI to augment network engineers helps reduce mean time to resolution and ensures applications are delivered more reliably.

Guest: Phillip Gervasi (LinkedIn)
Company: Kentik (Twitter)
Show: Let’s See

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.