Kentik helps its customers improve uptime, productivity and cost control via implementation of a new modern data stack.
Like many rapidly growing companies, Kentik found challenges in enhancing its internal data architecture to support its business expansion. Siloed and decentralized data and a lack of data availability and reporting needed to be addressed before Kentik could maximize its use of data. To address these and other issues, Kentik partnered with Data Clymer to build out its modern data stack and to better deliver on its value of improved uptime, productivity and cost control for network observability.
Kentik Overview
Kentik provides a network observability solution that helps its customers maintain the availability and performance of network-based services for their users.
As Justin Guerra, head of business operations for Kentik, describes it, “Kentik is the network observability company. Our platform is a must-have for the network front line. Network professionals turn to our Network Observability Cloud to plan, run and manage any network, relying on our infinite granularity, AI-driven insights, and ridiculously fast search. Kentik makes sense of network, cloud, host and container flow, internet routing, performance tests, and network metrics. That’s why data-driven companies like IBM, Box, New Relic, Zoom and others rely on Kentik to provide network observability.”
The Problem: Siloed and Decentralized Data
To support its business operations, Kentik was leveraging a variety of data integration vendors and platforms, such as Fivetran, Looker, and Google BigQuery, all of which needed to not only operate seamlessly, but the architecture had to also be scalable to drive and support the organization’s growth. The initial challenge was not necessarily with the tools but with the manner in which they were initially implemented and maintained.
Additionally, Kentik didn’t have good data visualizations to assist its business goal setting, prioritization, and decision making processes. This was due to the number of data silos that had been built up over time leaving the company without a single source of truth for all its data.
The Solution: A Modern Data Strategy and Instant Data Team
To help address these problems as well as develop a more modern data strategy, Kentik decided to partner with Data Clymer.
Data Clymer’s team of skilled data engineers, deep knowledge of data integration and experience with cloud data warehousing best practices allowed Kentik to build a more robust and modern data architecture. This new architecture included integrating the various tools that were already in place as well as implementing a new dbt instance for data modeling, data quality and data source freshness. By leveraging dbt as part of its data stack, Kentik is now able to keep business logic in the backend helping to improve overall query time within Looker.
The three main areas that Data Clymer focused on to improve Kentik’s data analytics, insights and resourcing challenges include:
Dashboarding
- Developing a company-wide dashboard in Looker to provide a comprehensive and cohesive understanding of Kentik’s business as a whole, instead of disparate and segmented views.
- Creating product-specific dashboards to bring product and sales data into one place for the first time to understand both revenue trends and data usage. This allows Kentik to identify clients not fully leveraging their products so they can proactively decrease churn by coordinating product utilization and sales data.
- Implementing a data health and monitoring dashboard to ensure data quality and integrity.
Financial Insights
- Leveraging dbt snapshots to gain insight into how Kentik’s sales pipeline changes over time allowing the company to better understand and maximize its sales funnel.
- Enabling Kentik to glean insights related to sales inflows and outflows based on time horizons. Users are now able to adjust date ranges to analyze projected sales for any period.
Recruiting
- Collaborating with the team at Lever, a recruiting software firm, to understand Kentik’s recruiting process and pipeline. Data Clymer recreated Lever’s UI visualizations for Kentik creating a single dashboard for the most important recruiting insights.
But, perhaps most important, the overall data culture at Kentik has become more democratized as the entire organization is now able to quickly and easily access the data they need in the format required to be effective, with a fast back-end and a consistent, trusted, source-of-truth front-end.
Justin says that Data Clymer engineer Rob Seaberg “takes a genuine interest in understanding our business,” and describes the relationship with Data Clymer as “a true partnership that I rely on.” He goes on to say that the expertise that Rob and Data Clymer provide is “absolutely critical,” to the success of Kentik.
Data Team Recruiting as a Service
As Kentik worked with Rob and the Data Clymer engineering team to modernize and improve its data architecture, it was also in the process of building out its own data and analytics team.
As part of its data culture transformation effort, Kentik had been searching for the right person to work with Data Clymer to own the build out of its in-house data team. Out of about 40 resumes received, only three warranted a second look. But with its extensive network of external data experts, Data Clymer was able to step in and help. Data Clymer ultimately identified an ideal candidate, and now Kentik has a new Director of Business Intelligence who works closely with the Data Clymer team.
A Thriving and Growing Partnership
Justin says that Kentik will continue to partner with Rob and the rest of the Data Clymer team to ensure that Kentik data capabilities continue to evolve to meet the company’s growing data needs. At a minimum, he considers the Data Clymer relationship a “safety net” as they move ahead.
Need Help with Your Modern Data Stack?
Kentik is just one more example of a successful ongoing Data Clymer relationship. Check out the many other case studies and companies we work with on the Data Clymer website.
Find out about how a partnership with Data Clymer can help you modernize your data architecture and eliminate data silos. Give us a shout – we’d love to hear from you!