Today, Infoblox announced a definitive agreement to acquire Kentik, a network observability company, to combine DNS and asset visibility with real-time traffic intelligence for what they are calling “AgenticOps.”
We’ve been down this road already.
In 2024, BlueCat acquired Indeni to bring network infrastructure monitoring and automation into our platform. In 2025, we acquired LiveAction to add deep network observability and performance monitoring.
The thesis behind both moves was straightforward: DDI (DNS, DHCP, and IP address management) provides you with incredibly rich information about what is on your network, but it doesn’t tell you what is actually happening on your network. Closing that gap makes self-healing networks possible instead of theoretical. This is why we doubled down on our Intelligent NetOps vision.
Why Infoblox’s acquisition of Kentik matters
Infoblox’s own materials on the Kentik deal describe the problem almost exactly the way we’ve described it for two years. DNS context sits in one system, traffic and performance data in another, and security signals in a third. The result is blind spots, slow root cause analysis, and AI initiatives built on fragmented data. Infoblox’s stated goal is a unified data fabric that lets AI move from “signal to answer to action.”
That’s Intelligent NetOps. We didn’t coin the phrase for marketing effect.
It’s the reason we made the acquisitions we made: To build toward a single platform that unifies DDI, network monitoring, and observability, with the goal of enabling networks to detect and correct problems with minimal human intervention.
It’s a meaningful signal when one of the largest, most established players in DNS and network services concludes that DDI and DNS security alone are no longer a sufficient product to sell and goes and buys observability to compete. It tells us, and it should tell customers evaluating vendors in this space, that the direction we bet on two years ago is now the direction the whole market is moving.
Where BlueCat and the industry go from here
We’re continuing to invest in bringing our DDI, network monitoring, and observability capabilities together into a single Intelligent NetOps platform. Self-healing networks are the destination.
We expect the market to become more crowded and more competitive as more vendors reach the same conclusion we did. That’s a healthy sign for an idea, not a threat to it.
We’ll have more to share about the specifics of our platform in the weeks and months ahead.
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