Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What does "good" actually look like for a fiber-to-the-home network? According to two of the people who build them, it looks like nothing at all. No complaints. No support calls. No coffee-talk the next morning about the stream that buffered. Just a light switch that turns all the way on, every time.

Most monitoring tells you whether a service is up. Network synthetic monitoring tells you what the experience looks like from where your users actually are — and where on the network path a problem lives.

Network problems are NO laughing matter.

Hear how Kentik uses AI to validate AI and catch 90%+ of bad networking answers before users ever see them.

In 2026, the best network monitoring tools are Kentik, Datadog, SolarWinds NPM, LogicMonitor, Cisco ThousandEyes, Dynatrace, Auvik, Paessler PRTG, ManageEngine OpManager, Zabbix, OpenNMS, and WhatsUp Gold — spanning four overlapping categories: network intelligence platforms, full-stack observability, digital experience monitoring (DEM), and traditional network performance monitoring (NPM), including open-source tools.

Network problems are easy to spot. Proving root cause is the hard part — and it’s where most of MTTR gets burned. Kentik’s new AI diagnostics in the Network Monitoring System (NMS) close the gap between detection and diagnosis by bringing three capabilities directly into Kentik AI Advisor.

LLMs have sucked all the oxygen out of the AI conversation — but AI is much more than just LLMs, and network engineers have been using AI techniques (machine learning, statistics, fuzzy logic, expert systems, neural networks) for decades. So what should LLMs be doing in network operations, what shouldn't they be doing, and how do agentic AI architectures fit in?

Why do network and infrastructure teams at leading enterprises including Canva, Dropbox, Google ConocoPhillips, and ServiceNow choose Kentik? In their own words, customers describe epic cost savings, dramatic return on investment, and blockbuster efficiency improvements that only Kentik can deliver. Learn why Kentik is the must-see network intelligence solution any enterprise that depends on reliable connectivity.

What happens when you replace legacy network tools with Kentik AI Advisor?

"We pay less in transit IP costs today than we did when we turned up Kentik. Our cost per Mbps is lowered over the years — and our traffic is seven times what it was when we started." — Michael Leclaire, MetroNet.