Internet service provider (ISP) Cogent Communications deployed Kentik Detect to automate traffic engineering, optimize network performance, and find new revenue streams. This is the fifth of the 10 top global ISPs that leverages Kentik on its network.

Kentik Detect is the network monitoring company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) network traffic intelligence platform. It's designed for network operators, which includes ISPs, enterprises that operate networks for internal services, and digital enterprises.

The platform helps operators understand what is happening in their networks for incident response use cases and helps them identify new sources of revenue within their network.

“Kentik’s SaaS platform is not only about making it really easy for customers to use and deploy, but also about giving them access to the horsepower that they really need to accomplish these tasks at the scale that these networks operate at today,” said Jim Meehan, the company’s head of product marketing.

Cogent wanted to leverage three components of Kentik Detect. The first of these was increasing incident detection and incident response time. The platform achieves this by joining together disparate data sources so the service provider can quickly identify and find the details needed to solve the network problem.

The second is using Kentik for sales prospecting. The platform enables the provider to look at the traffic that crosses its network, not only from directly connected networks of its partners and existing customers, but also from those who receive traffic from Cogent’s network but aren’t yet directly connected. This benefits the organizations engineering, sales, finance, and product teams.

The final use for Kentik is traffic engineering to optimize Cogent’s network. This process is fully automated and is moving toward closed-loop automation, which Meehan said is ”really about reducing the time it takes to perform these tasks, allowing optimization to take place more quickly.” The traffic engineering capability allows Cogent to reduce traffic congestion, identify where traffic is reaching capacity, and increase performance by rerouting traffic to make it more efficient.

Prior to deploying Kentik, Cogent used an internally built platform. But according to Meehan it was missing some aspects of what the monitoring company can provide.