Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Generic AI fails in network operations because it lacks the “institutional knowledge” of your specific environment and business priorities. Learn how Kentik’s Custom Network Context encodes your unique operational reality into AI Advisor, turning a generic chatbot into a context-aware teammate.

This year-end wrap-up covers topics from BGP security (including ASPA and excessive AS-SETs) and the geopolitical (Ukraine’s IPv4 exodus, the Iran internet shutdown, and Red Sea cable cuts) to the year’s most significant outages (TikTok, the Spain/Portugal blackout, and cloud failures at AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare). Plus, we explore Starlink’s new Community Gateways, and revisit the evolving landscape of AS ranking and OTT service tracking.

Kentik AI Runbooks are machine-readable instructions that codify tribal knowledge into specific diagnostic workflows. By guiding AI Advisor’s reasoning and tool selection, Runbooks turn alerts into actionable, automated investigations, dramatically accelerating MTTR.

In this edition of Anatomy of an OTT Traffic Surge, we look at Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video. Based on traffic stats, TNF is the most watched program on the streaming service. Using Kentik’s OTT capabilities, we’ll see how this program gets delivered and how that has changed over 11 weeks of the NFL season.

The rise of autonomous AI attacks operating at machine speed demands that network security evolve beyond human capacity and manual processes. Kentik AI Advisor counters this threat by using AI for good, reasoning across full network context to proactively eliminate vulnerabilities and guide immediate, confident defense.

Introducing Kentik AI Advisor, a powerful new AI designed to deeply understand your network, reason through complex issues, and deliver clear, actionable guidance for designing, operating, and protecting your networks. By autonomously querying Kentik’s rich telemetry and tools, it explains what’s happening, why it matters, and what to do next — from troubleshooting and capacity planning to cost optimization and risk mitigation.

The age of dashboards is ending, as observability has only created more noise for network teams to sift through. Kentik SVP of Product, Mav Turner, lays out why true network intelligence requires a clean, contextual data foundation to finally create a network that thinks.

AI in networking isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s here, reshaping how we operate. At the ONUG AI Networking Summit, we saw firsthand how agent systems are moving from hype to hands-on reality, from secure automation to data-driven root cause analysis. The future of NetOps isn’t dashboards and tickets — it’s intelligent agents, observability, and measurable business outcomes.

The network has transformed dramatically. Hybrid cloud architectures and AI-powered infrastructure seem to expand in scale and complexity every day. But legacy tools to monitor and observe these networks have not kept up.