InfluxDB vs Kentik comparison

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InfluxDB

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

InfluxDB and Kentik compete in the data management and network analytics space. InfluxDB has the upper hand for efficient time-series data handling, while Kentik stands out with its comprehensive network performance monitoring capabilities.

Features: InfluxDB offers high-performance time-series data management, scalability, and an efficient analytics and monitoring solution. Kentik provides advanced network visibility, in-depth performance analytics, and specialized tools for complex network requirements.

Room for Improvement: InfluxDB could enhance its network-centric features, broaden its analytics capabilities, and improve integration with non-time-series data. Kentik could simplify its deployment process, optimize costs for users with basic needs, and improve data-centric features to broaden its appeal.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: InfluxDB supports straightforward deployment with flexible cloud options, and it offers reliable support for a smooth experience. Kentik's deployment process can be more complex due to its network-specific features, but it compensates with a robust customer service model that aids users through the setup.

Pricing and ROI: InfluxDB typically incurs lower setup costs and offers a favorable ROI for businesses focusing on time-series data. Its pricing is appealing for those prioritizing cost efficiency. Kentik has higher setup costs reflecting its extensive features, yet provides justified ROI for businesses needing comprehensive network management solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed InfluxDB vs. Kentik Report (Updated: June 2025).

InfluxDB vs. Kentik

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

InfluxDB

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

24th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Non-Relational Databases (2nd), Open Source Databases (9th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (23rd), NoSQL Databases (3rd)

Kentik

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

33rd

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (17th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of InfluxDB is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kentik is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

DeepakR

Site Reliability Engineer(Observability) at Sapiens

An open-source database that can be used to insert data

InfluxDB is generally stable, but we've encountered issues with the configuration file in our ticket stack. For instance, a mistake in one of the metrics out of a hundred KPIs can disrupt data collection for all KPIs. This happens because the agent stops working if there's an issue with any configuration part. To address this, it is essential to ensure that all configurations are part of the agent's EXE file when provided. This makes it easier to package the agent for server installation and ensures all KPIs are available from the server. Additionally, the agent cannot encrypt and decrypt passwords for authentication, which can be problematic when monitoring URLs or requiring authentication tokens. This requires additional scripting and can prolong service restart times.

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ADRIANA SALDARRIAGA TOBON

Sales Manager at IFX NEtworks

Client experience and cybersecurity have improved with an easy setup

The solution is valuable for client experience, especially in the financial sector. The most important feature is cybersecurity. The pricing is good, but the functionality is the most important aspect for clients. The solution is easy to deploy and requires only one person to set up, making it easy and quick. Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable features are aggregating the data and integration with Graphana for monitoring."

"The most valuable features of InfluxDB are the documentation and performance, and the good plugins metrics in the ecosystem."

"The solution is very powerful."

"InfluxDB's best feature is that it's a cloud offering. Other good features include its time-series DB, fast time-bulk queries, and window operations."

"While I would rate InfluxDB a ten on a scale of one to ten, users should be thoughtful about matching the engine to their specific needs."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is we can use InfluxDB to integrate with and plug into any other tools."

"InfluxDB is a database where you can insert data. However, it would be best if you had different components for alerting, data sending, and visualization. You need to install tools to collect data from servers. It must be installed on Windows or Linux servers. During installation, ensure that the configuration file is correct to prevent issues. Once data is collected, it can be sent to InfluxDB. For visualization, you can use open-source tools like Grafana."

"The platform operates very quickly. It is easy to configure, connect, and query and integrates seamlessly with Grafana."

More InfluxDB pros

"The most important feature is cybersecurity."

"Overall, I would give Kentik nine out of ten stars."

"In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place."

"Kentik excels in telemetry within data centers and works well in multi-vendor environments."

"One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space."

"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."

"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."

"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."

More Kentik pros

Cons

"The solution doesn't have much of a user interface."

"The solution's UI can be more user-friendly."

"In terms of features that I would like to see or have, in the community version, some features are not available. I would like to have clustering and authentication in the community version."

"The error logging capability can be improved because the logs are not very informative."

"InfluxDB can improve by including new metrics on other technologies. They had some changes recently to pool data from endpoints but the functionality is not good enough in the industry."

"InfluxDB is generally stable, but we've encountered issues with the configuration file in our ticket stack. For instance, a mistake in one of the metrics out of a hundred KPIs can disrupt data collection for all KPIs. This happens because the agent stops working if there's an issue with any configuration part. To address this, it is essential to ensure that all configurations are part of the agent's EXE file when provided. This makes it easier to package the agent for server installation and ensures all KPIs are available from the server. Additionally, the agent cannot encrypt and decrypt passwords for authentication, which can be problematic when monitoring URLs or requiring authentication tokens. This requires additional scripting and can prolong service restart times."

"I've tried both on-premises and cloud-based deployments, and each has its limitations."

"It is challenging to get long-running backups while running InfluxDB in a Microsoft Azure Kubernetes cluster."

More InfluxDB cons

"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."

"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."

"Sometimes, the tool has complications, so we must deal with the additional support from the tool's end."

"We had faced some issues during an outage and were not able to get the desired results from Kentik tools. It took time to resolve these issues, which is why I give them eight points."

"The product could strive for more improvements to become closer to perfect."

"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."

"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."

"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."

More Kentik cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"InfluxDB recently increased its price. It is very expensive now."

"InfluxDB is open-source, but there are additional costs for scaling."

"The tool is an open-source product."

"We are using the open-source version of InfluxDB."

"The tool is cheaply priced."

"We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about InfluxDB?

InfluxDB is a database where you can insert data. However, it would be best if you had different components for alerting, data sending, and visualization. You need to install tools to collect data ...

What needs improvement with InfluxDB?

It is challenging to get long-running backups while running InfluxDB in a Microsoft Azure Kubernetes cluster. Replicating data for on-prem development and testing is difficult. Having a SQL abstrac...

What is your primary use case for InfluxDB?

InfluxDB is the main component in our large enterprise-scale streaming data application for maritime vessels. We collect position data from vessels around the coast once per second, put it on a Kaf...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kentik?

I would say Kentik's pricing is not cheap. From my perspective as part of the technical team, I would not categorize it as expensive, but I know it is not cheap.

What needs improvement with Kentik?

There's always room for improvements and better relations when using any kind of product. We faced some issues with Kentik UI and alerting, which we asked them to fix, and they succeeded. They have...

What is your primary use case for Kentik?

We are using Kentik mostly for synthetic tests, and from one last year, network monitoring as well. We are using it for inter DC BGP tests and server monitoring as well.

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Cassandra vs InfluxDB

Compared 5% of the time

ThousandEyes vs Kentik

Compared 14% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Kentik

Compared 11% of the time

Datadog vs Kentik

Compared 10% of the time

Zabbix vs Kentik

Compared 9% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Kentik

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

InfluxDB

Download InfluxDB product report

Download Kentik product report

Overview

InfluxDB is open-source software that helps developers and enterprises alike to collect, store, process, and visualize time series data and to build next-generation applications. InfluxDB provides monitoring and insight on IoT, application, system, container, and infrastructure quickly and easily without complexities or compromises in scale, speed, or productivity.

InfluxDB has become a popular insight system for unified metrics and events enabling the most demanding SLAs. InfluxDB is used in just about every type of industry across a wide range of use cases, including network monitoring, IoT monitoring, industrial IoT, and infrastructure and application monitoring.

InfluxDB offers its users:

Infrastructure and application monitoring: Collect, process, and analyze real-time data from edge devices to help optimize distributed infrastructure.

IoT monitoring and analytics: InfluxDB is designed to store large volumes of time series data and quickly perform real-time analysis on that data. Gain insights from all the sensor data and use the collected data to create and perform automated tasks.

Network monitoring: Manage responsive and high-performing networks with widely distributed resources.

InfluxDB Benefits

There are several benefits to using InfluxDB . Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

APIs and ready toolset: InfluxDB can be accessed via a set of powerful tools enabling users to get started quickly, with less programming required. This includes a REST API, extensive client libraries, a wide variety of open-source integrations, and Flux - a functional data scripting language for querying, analysis, and events. The InfluxDB API can be used to write data from edge devices to the InfluxDB instance

Time series engine: Get any data - events, logs, traces - from any edge device - systems, sensors, queues, databases, and networks. This data is stored in a powerful and high-performing engine capable of ingesting millions of data points per second.

Community: InfluxDB has a large community of cloud and open-source developers ready to assist users.

Ready-made templates: Use InfluxDB Templates, a set of tools with a packager and other ready monitoring solutions. These tools allow users to share their monitoring expertise with coworkers and other community members around the world. The Templates gallery offers available templates for some of the most popular tools and applications.

Enhanced UI: InfluxDB’s UI includes an explorer, dashboarding tools, and a script editor. Use it to easily browse the collected metric and event data and apply common transformations. The dashboarding tool comes with a variety of visualization options that help users view insights from the data. The script editor assists users to quickly master Flux with easily accessible examples, auto-completion, and real-time syntax checking.

Reviews from Real Users

InfluxDB stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its flexible integration options and its data aggregation feature.

Shalauddin Ahamad S., a software engineer at a tech services company, notes, “The most valuable features are aggregating the data and the integration with Grafana for monitoring.”

InfluxData

Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.

With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.

Sample Customers

ebay, AXA, Mozilla, DiDi, LeTV, Siminars, Cognito, ProcessOut, Recommend, CATS, Smarsh, Row 44, Clustree, Bleemeo

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent.

InfluxDB vs. Kentik