It started with a question from one of our customers.
A device on their network made a DNS query to resolve a malicious host. They could see the query, but they couldn’t see what that device touched next. So they asked a simple question: “What if we could pull up a single map of everything that device connected to inside the environment?” One picture. The whole blast radius, instantly. That would be game-changing.
That question stuck with me, because today most teams don’t have this visibility. The data they’d need lives in too many disconnected places.
A few times in a career, you get to be part of a moment that creates a new market. For me, the news that Infoblox intends to acquire Kentik is one of those moments, and I couldn’t be more excited to share why.
I’ve spent a lot of my career at the intersection of networking and security, and I’ve watched both disciplines grow more complex, more interdependent and—frankly—more fragmented. Teams have more tools than ever, yet still struggle to answer simple questions: What’s on my network? Where is traffic actually going? Is this service performing the way it should? Is it safe? Bringing Infoblox and Kentik together answers those questions in one place, and that’s a big deal for our customers.
Two market leaders, one clear fit
Infoblox is the trusted foundation of the modern network. For more than two decades, we’ve been the industry leader in DNS, DHCP and IP address management (DDI), and for nearly a decade, we’ve built on that foundation to also deliver preemptive security. We help thousands of organizations, including most of the Fortune 100, secure and automate the critical network services every digital business depends on. We know what’s connected, who it is, where it’s trying to go and whether that destination is risky.
Kentik is a leader in network observability and intelligence. Its platform gives modern infrastructure teams real-time visibility into traffic behavior, performance, paths and routing, cloud networks and synthetic tests. Kentik shows how traffic is actually moving, where performance changed and how the experience is impacted.
Individually, these capabilities are powerful. Together, they are transformative: A single platform unites authoritative network identity, combined with DNS-based context and security intelligence, with live operational views. Correlated in real time. Made instantly actionable through AI.
It’s time to stop stitching tools together
Today, networking, cloud and security teams stitch together DDI, security and observability tools that were never designed to talk to each other. DNS context lives in one place, traffic behavior in another, performance data in a third, while network identity and security details sit in separate systems elsewhere. The result is blind spots, slow root-cause analysis and security decisions made with only half the picture.
Our approach is fundamentally different: we’re turning the infrastructure into the ultimate intelligence fabric and pioneering AI-driven network and security intelligence. Not a collection of point tools, but a unified platform that connects what is configured, who and what is on the network, where traffic is going, how it’s performing and what to do next, all on one foundation built for the age of AI.
AI is only as good as the data foundation
Here’s the part that matters most as AI takes on real operational responsibility: AI is only as good as the data beneath it. Imagine a doctor diagnosing a patient while the lab results, the history and the vitals each live in a different system that never talk to each other; They’re guessing, not diagnosing. That’s how most automation runs today, drawing from fractured datasets, and fractured data produces incomplete, even misleading, results.
Infoblox and Kentik will solve this at the source by creating a single, trusted operational data fabric: DNS intent and context, asset visibility and preemptive security signals from Infoblox, united with full-fidelity flow, path, performance and synthetic data from Kentik. Through open protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP), teams can connect this fabric to the AI, automation and orchestration tools they already use. For the first time, network identity, intent, behavior and impact live in one place, not scattered across disconnected systems. That’s the difference between AI that guesses and AI that knows.
Better together: control, context, visibility and intelligence
The magic is in the combination. Think about what becomes possible:
- Stronger, faster security: Remember that customer’s question. A device reaches for a suspicious domain. Infoblox sees the intent and Kentik maps everything that device touched next: what it connected to and which assets are now in play. In one picture, teams see the full blast radius. In seconds, they move from a low-confidence signal to a verified incident. Triage time drops. Confidence in every response goes up.
- More efficient and confident NetOps: Something breaks. Is it what the team configured, or what’s actually happening on the wire? Infoblox knows what should happen. Kentik shows what is happening: live traffic, path, performance, device health. Put them together and teams stop having to guess. Fewer cross-team escalations. Fewer ticket reassignments. MTTR in minutes, not hours. Service you can count on.
- Better automation outcomes with complete context: A service is degrading. Is it DNS resolution? A misconfiguration? A routing change? A congested path? An overloaded interface? A device that’s simply down? Now, an AI assistant answers with confidence because it sees the whole picture, not a slice of it. That’s automation you can trust to act.
So, what does this mean for our customers? Fewer silos, stronger security, better performance and a smarter, safer path to automated operations.
Why I’m optimistic
Beyond technology, this is a story about two cultures that share a similar mindset. Both Infoblox and Kentik were built by teams that care deeply about customer outcomes, technical excellence and solving hard infrastructure problems at scale. The future of networking and security will require that kind of passion, curiosity and ambition.
As we bring these companies and capabilities together, we’ll do things neither of us could do alone: validate reality against expectation continuously, ground every AI-driven action in complete network truth and give customers the clarity and control they need to manage every critical connection.
We have a lot more to share in the months ahead. In the meantime, talk to your Infoblox team about what Infoblox and Kentik can do for your environment.
For now, on behalf of everyone at Infoblox: welcome to what’s next.
