Kentik is the enterprise network observability platform that telcos, CDNs, and large cloud providers use to understand traffic flows, detect DDoS attacks, and optimize peering decisions. It ingests NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, and BGP data at terabit scale and turns it into actionable network intelligence.
It is not what a SaaS team uses to find out their checkout API is returning 502s.
This article compares Kentik and Vigilmon clearly — what each product is for, who should use each, and where the pricing and complexity gap becomes the deciding factor.
What Kentik Is
Kentik is an enterprise network observability and traffic intelligence platform. It was designed for organizations where the network itself is the product — internet service providers, CDNs, cloud infrastructure teams, and large enterprises managing complex multi-site WAN environments.
Core capabilities include:
- NetFlow / IPFIX / sFlow ingestion: Collects raw flow telemetry from routers, switches, and cloud VPCs at massive scale
- BGP route analytics: Tracks route announcements and withdrawals across the internet routing table, enabling visibility into peering, transit, and reachability
- DDoS detection and mitigation: Identifies volumetric attacks through traffic anomaly detection and integrates with upstream mitigation providers
- Traffic cost optimization: Analyzes peering vs. transit decisions, enabling ISPs and CDNs to reduce expensive transit costs
- Network performance monitoring: End-to-end path analysis, latency, jitter, and packet loss measurement across network paths
- Cloud network visibility: VPC flow logs and cloud traffic analysis for AWS, Azure, and GCP environments
- Data explorer and custom dashboards: SQL-like query interface for ad-hoc analysis of flow data
Kentik's value proposition requires network telemetry at scale. Its customers are organizations where a peering decision is a seven-figure cost question, where DDoS attacks arrive at hundreds of gigabits per second, and where network engineers need to analyze traffic at a granularity that commodity monitoring cannot provide.
What Vigilmon Is
Vigilmon is an external uptime monitoring platform. It checks whether your HTTP endpoints, TCP ports, and SSL certificates are reachable from the public internet — from multiple geographic regions — on a continuous cadence. When something fails, it alerts via Slack, email, or webhook.
The defining feature is multi-region consensus alerting: before Vigilmon fires an alert, a quorum of independent regional probes must agree the endpoint is down. Single-probe transient failures are filtered out. Only confirmed, multi-geography outages generate pages.
A public status page is included and updates automatically.
Setup: under two minutes. No routers. No flow telemetry. No BGP feeds.
The Core Distinction: Network Intelligence vs. Application Availability
Kentik and Vigilmon are not competing products. They operate at entirely different layers of the stack with entirely different audiences.
Kentik answers network-layer questions at scale:
- "Which AS paths are delivering traffic to our CDN?"
- "Is this volumetric DDoS sourced from these prefixes?"
- "Does de-peering with this transit provider save us $400k per year?"
Vigilmon answers application availability questions:
- "Is our API reachable right now?"
- "Are users in Europe getting slow responses?"
- "Did our SSL certificate expire?"
A network engineer at a CDN provider evaluating traffic engineering tooling should look at Kentik. A developer at a SaaS company who wants to know when their product goes down — and wants their team paged before a customer tweets about it — should look at Vigilmon.
These are different jobs, different budgets, and different tooling decisions.
The Complexity Gap
Kentik requires:
- Network telemetry sources: Flow-capable routers, switches, or cloud flow log exports configured to send data to Kentik
- BGP feeds: If you want route analytics, you need BGP session configuration
- Network engineers: The platform produces data that requires network expertise to interpret and act on
- Procurement cycles: Kentik is enterprise-sold, with custom pricing and contract negotiations
Vigilmon requires:
- A URL: Enter your endpoint, click save
- Nothing else
For teams that don't have flow-capable routers, BGP sessions, or a dedicated network engineering team, Kentik's data requirements are not satisfiable — before the pricing conversation even starts.
Pricing Comparison
Kentik Pricing
Kentik's pricing is not publicly listed. It is enterprise-sold with pricing determined by:
- Flow data volume (flows per second ingested)
- Number of devices and data sources
- Feature tier (NMS, DDoS mitigation, BGP analytics)
- Contract term and commitment
Published estimates from industry sources place Kentik at $20,000–$100,000+ per year for enterprise deployments. ISP and CDN deployments at meaningful traffic scale are typically at the higher end. It is purchased through sales-led cycles with procurement involvement.
Vigilmon Pricing
| Tier | Cost | What's Included | |---|---|---| | Free | $0 | 5 monitors, 1-minute intervals, status page, Slack alerts | | Pro | ~$10–20/month | More monitors, 30-second check intervals | | Self-hosted | ~$5/month (VPS only) | Unlimited monitors, open source |
Vigilmon's free tier covers five HTTP/TCP/SSL monitors indefinitely. No sales call required.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Vigilmon | Kentik | |---|---|---| | External HTTP/HTTPS monitoring | Yes — core product | No (network-layer focus) | | Multi-region consensus alerting | Yes | No | | SSL certificate monitoring | Yes | No | | TCP port monitoring | Yes | Partial (network path only) | | Customer-facing status page | Yes, included | No | | NetFlow / IPFIX ingestion | No | Yes — core capability | | BGP route analytics | No | Yes | | DDoS detection | No | Yes | | Traffic cost optimization | No | Yes | | Network path analysis | No | Yes | | Cloud VPC flow visibility | No | Yes | | Setup complexity | Enter a URL, done | Routers + telemetry config | | Team required | Any developer | Network engineers | | Free tier | Yes — 5 monitors | No | | Starting price | Free | ~$20,000+/year (est.) | | Self-hostable | Yes (open source) | No | | Target buyer | SaaS teams, developers | ISPs, CDNs, enterprises |
Who Should Use Kentik
Kentik is the right choice for a narrow, well-defined audience:
- Internet service providers and telcos: Organizations where network traffic engineering is core business — optimizing peering, managing congestion, analyzing customer traffic.
- CDNs and large cloud infrastructure teams: Teams with multi-POP global infrastructure that need visibility into traffic routing, cache hit patterns, and reachability at the network layer.
- Enterprise network teams at large organizations: Companies with complex multi-site WAN environments, dedicated network engineering teams, and budget for enterprise network observability.
- Organizations facing DDoS at scale: When volumetric attacks arrive at tens or hundreds of gigabits per second, you need flow-based detection integrated with mitigation infrastructure.
Who Should Use Vigilmon
- SaaS teams and developers: If your primary monitoring question is "is our application up for users?" — that is exactly what Vigilmon answers. It requires no network engineering expertise and no infrastructure to deploy.
- Teams deploying globally: Multi-region consensus means Vigilmon checks from Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, and other regions simultaneously. Regional availability issues are detected as a first-class concern.
- Any team with a customer-facing product: Your users don't care about BGP paths. They care whether your product loads. External HTTP monitoring answers that question directly.
- Teams that need a status page: Vigilmon's status page is included. No additional tooling, no separate subscription.
- Teams without network engineers: Vigilmon requires zero network expertise to deploy, configure, or operate.
Conclusion
Kentik is an enterprise network intelligence platform for ISPs, CDNs, and large infrastructure teams who need to understand traffic flows at scale. If you are optimizing peering decisions or hunting DDoS sources in NetFlow data — Kentik is a serious tool.
If you are a SaaS team or developer who wants to know whether your API is reachable, whether your SSL cert is valid, and whether you'll know about outages before your users do — Kentik is the wrong category of tool entirely.
External application availability monitoring and network traffic intelligence are different problems with different solutions. For the problem of "is our product up right now, from everywhere, for everyone?" — Vigilmon is purpose-built and available free.
Start monitoring for free at vigilmon.online — 5 monitors, 1-minute intervals, multi-region consensus alerting, status page, Slack notifications. No routers to configure. No credit card required.
Tags: #monitoring #devops #kentik #networkmonitoring #uptime #saas #sre #observability