Guest: Christoph Pfister (LinkedIn)
Company: Kentik (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Network observability company, Kentik, is helping customers cut through the mass of network data to get meaningful real-time insights to help with troubleshooting. The company recently launched Kentik Kube, which aims to extend that visibility to give engineers insights into the network traffic of their Kubernetes clusters and pods so that they can detect and resolve network issues.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Christoph Pfister, Chief Product Officer at Kentik while at KubeCon in Chicago, introduces us to the company and talks about their network-first approach to observability. He discusses some of the key challenges of networks and why Kentik’s solutions set them apart from their competitors.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Pfister gives us an overview of Kentik, an observability company with a network-first approach. He explains that many observability companies focus on application-level observability but few companies focus on network observability. He explains how they ingest all the network telemetry so that customers can do analysis of the data.
• Pfister shares his observations from KubeCon and similar events. He talks about how they are helping customers by supporting backends and clouds with their Kubernetes approach.
• Kentik defines observability as the ability to do open-ended exploration of the network data in real-time so that if there is a network problem you can work out what is wrong quickly. He discusses how this is a game-changer compared to just looking at a dashboard or alerts, and how this sets Kentik apart from others.
• Pfister tells us that they already have 400 customers since they understand the network is fundamental to their business. He feels that there is more education to do with traditional enterprises that have mainly been focused on on-prem networks.
• Kentik has recently announced Kentik Kube which aims to extend its value proposition into the Kubernetes ecosystem. Pfister discusses how the solution provides visibility on who your clusters and pods talk to, whether that is an embargoed country or if there is cross-region traffic to provide a much broader picture of what is going on.
• The way we write and deploy applications has changed and Pfister talks about some of the challenges of moving workloads to the cloud and managing networks. He explains that you need to observe the network, particularly when it comes to hybrid cloud connectivity, and how Kentik is helping provide this visibility for their customers.
• Pfister explains that they have been doing machine learning and anomaly detection for a long time to provide insights to customers about what is going on in their network. He talks about how generative AI is helping to lower the barriers to entry by enabling you to query Kentik in natural language.
• Pfister discusses some of the key focuses Kentik is working on, using natural language to ask questions and get out data based on the question being asked. He talks about how training the model on enough of these questions or journeys will become a big data set that may eventually be able to go from answering directly to a solution.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.