Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Enterprises are pouring billions into GPUs and AI compute, but most are overlooking the infrastructure that connects it all. Justin Ryburn, field CTO at Kentik, makes the case that the network is the most underestimated variable in whether AI initiatives succeed or fail.

Knowing something is broken is easy. Figuring out why is hard. Introducing three new, native AI diagnostic capabilities in the Kentik Network Intelligence Platform to accelerate root cause analysis and keep your network running better.

AI has quickly become part of the language of network observability. Many vendors across the observability landscape can describe, summarize, correlate, or explain some data or situation, leveraging basic LLM capabilities. At a distance, many of these offerings sound similar. They promise faster insight, efficient operations, and a more intelligent path through rising complexity. But the industry has reached a point where surface-level similarity is creating noise, not value.

Many BGP route leaks reported by automated detection systems are actually brief, low-impact artifacts of normal BGP convergence. Doug Madory examines examples from Cloudflare Radar, Routeviews, and Jared Mauch’s long-running leak detector to show how these “ephemeral leaks” arise, why they usually don’t disrupt traffic, and why they still matter for routing security.

Over the past few months, we’ve been making the Kentik platform easier to use and more actionable, with AI increasingly at the center of how teams interact with it. AI Advisor sits near the middle of a lot of that progress, but this is not only an AI story.

As cyberattacks evolve into “machine-speed” disruption campaigns that span cloud, identity, and network planes, traditional monitoring is no longer enough to protect modern enterprise infrastructure. Shifting to a network intelligence model, powered by real-time telemetry and AI-driven reasoning, enables security teams to detect weak signals and automate defenses before an incident becomes systemic.

Kentik’s AI Advisor acts as a virtual network engineer, helping teams of all skill levels troubleshoot, manage, and optimize their infrastructure with unprecedented speed and context. We explore seven practical NetOps use cases, from rapid incident triage and capacity planning to upcoming live-device command support, that demonstrate how using AI as a collaborative teammate dramatically reduces manual investigative work.

The secret to hyperscaler success isn’t magic. Kentik Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman explains how organizations can adopt the same operating principles and empower network teams to drive results that far exceeds their headcount.

This post expands on our analysis from last year that revealed that as much as 20% of IPv4 space has migrated out of Ukraine in the years following the Russian invasion in February 2022. This update reveals that AT&T (a popular destination for Ukrainian IPs) has since implemented a policy ridding itself of customers using AS7018 to originate their routes, often to support residential proxies.

AI in network operations is more than chatbots and agents. LLMs make AI easier to use, but the real value comes from the underlying system of telemetry, data pipelines, analytics, ML models, domain knowledge, and workflows that help engineers reason, predict, and act. When designed thoughtfully, AI doesn’t replace engineers. Instead, it augments their expertise and reduces cognitive load across complex network operations.