Infoblox buys Kentik, betting that DNS data is really network observability data
Published July 9, 2026 · DNS Benchmark Pro Editorial · Reading time: 2 minutes
In short — Infoblox has acquired network observability vendor Kentik, folding flow and telemetry analysis into its DNS, DHCP and IP address management platform.
Infoblox — the company most enterprises know as "the DDI box", meaning DNS, DHCP and IP address management — has acquired Kentik, a network observability vendor built around flow data and traffic analytics.
The strategic logic is not subtle. Infoblox already sits on one of the richest telemetry sources in any enterprise: every DNS query every device makes, tied to the DHCP lease that identifies the device. Kentik brings the layer underneath — NetFlow, sFlow, BGP, packet-level path data. Put them together and you can answer a question that neither product could answer alone: not just what resolved and not just what traffic flowed, but which device asked for which name, where the answer sent it, and what happened to the traffic on the way.
The pattern this fits
DNS has spent the last decade quietly migrating from plumbing to a security and observability control point. Quad9 built an entire resolver around blocking known-bad domains. Enterprise DNS filtering is now table stakes. DNS logs are, for many SOCs, the single highest-signal-per-byte telemetry available — every piece of malware has to resolve something eventually.
What Infoblox appears to be buying is the ability to sell that story as one platform rather than as an integration project. It also follows a broader consolidation trend across the DDI and observability space, where standalone monitoring vendors have found it increasingly hard to compete against platforms that already own the data source.
Does it matter to you?
If you run enterprise DNS infrastructure, this is a vendor-roadmap question worth watching: acquisitions of this shape usually mean two or three years of integration before the combined product is genuinely one thing, and existing Kentik customers will want clarity on standalone support.
If you are a home user or a small business picking a public resolver, it changes nothing directly. But it is a decent illustration of why resolver choice keeps getting more consequential. Your resolver is not a lookup table any more. It is the point where somebody — you, your ISP, a vendor, or a government — gets to see and shape everything your network reaches for.
That is worth thinking about when you pick one. Speed is the easy part to measure, which is what our benchmark does. Who sees the query, and what they are permitted to do with it, is the part you have to decide on deliberately.
Source: Network World, "Infoblox acquires Kentik, adding network observability to its DNS and DDI platform" (8 July 2026).
Published by Genext Information Systems · July 9, 2026. DNS Benchmark Pro is an independent tool and is not affiliated with any vendor or organisation named in this article. This report summarises publicly available disclosures and is provided for informational purposes.