Network observability company, Kentik, announces Kentik Labs as a community center for developers, DevOps, and site reliability engineering (SRE) community.
Kentik Labs is making five open source projects available as part of an effort to advance observability across network operations (NetOps). @mvizard https://t.co/HDJL6Tyuo1 #kentik #networking #opensource #sres pic.twitter.com/8b2t2jgDHS
— DevOps.com (@devopsdotcom) August 19, 2021
In general, developers and IT teams face many complexities on a daily. It’s challenging to understand the performance and health of apps distributed across clouds and data centers. In case of a failure, developers and IT teams need to determine the cause of the issue. It can occur due to the code, the infrastructure, or many other reasons, in this regard.
Kentik Labs aims to solve these issues for IT professionals, reducing the time it takes them to recover in case of a problem, also known as mean time to recovery (MTTR). It will do so through five open-source network observability tools. Its goal is to rule the network in or out as the issue quickly.
Ian Pye, who serves the roles of a co-founder and chief scientist of Kentik and co-chair of Kentik Labs, had this to say:
Whether the problem is the application or the network, Kentik Labs offers tools to focus your efforts at the right layer with the right team. In addition, branching out into open-source technology will allow us to participate in adjacent communities and define the future of observability.
The five open-source projects are kTranslate, NetDiag, Convis, kProbe, and Grafana App.
kTranslate refers to a system for pulling and pushing network data and the basis of the integration with New Relic, while NetDiag is scalable, asynchronous implementations of low-level network diagnostics. Convis is the example code showing how to use eBPF to attribute process and container information to network traffic. The fourth tool, kProbe is a high-performance host and sensor network probe (PCAP). At last, Grafana App is a real-time internet-scale ingest and querying of network data.
Nick Stinemates, who serves the roles of a vice president of business development at Kentik and co-chair of Kentik Labs, had this to say:
Cloud and containers are pushing applications to be distributed by default. This means the network is a critical component in building anything. With the launch of Kentik Labs, we’ll be exploring how to best integrate these concepts with the tools our users and customers are using today.
