The Ultimate Akamai Observability Solution

Over the years, developers working with Akamai's security and content delivery solutions have been able to rely on a wide variety of different tools for observability. Applications and API microservices running on the Akamai Connected Cloud are generating millions of DataStream log lines and security events that previously have been available in the Akamai Control Center or available through reporting APIs such as the DataStream API and SIEM API.

Ingesting these millions of events into your own observability infrastructure might seem like a good approach but it comes with some ... interesting challenges. Data storage, data retention, compliance and finally cost are all challenge to overcome in building out a scalable, reliable and fast observability platform that can help with analyzing application and API performance and security.

In 2023, I was introduced to a new platform, Akamai TrafficPeak and my eyes lit up seeing the capabilities of what Hydrolix has built on top of the Akamai Connected Cloud compute stack.

So what is Akamai TrafficPeak?

TrafficPeak, on Akamai Connected Cloud, is an observability platform that enables your customers to ingest, monitor, query, store and analyze massive amounts of data in real time. With its visualization dashboards, your customers can uncover and mitigate performance and security issues before they impact their users, giving them a highly responsive and reliable digital experience.

Unlike other observability platforms, your customers can retain massive amounts of data on TrafficPeak for years, at a fraction of the cost of other providers. This enables them to identify and mitigate the root cause of issues before they impact their users.

With TrafficPeak, your customers can analyze more data, retain it for as long as they desire, at a lower cost, and optimize performance for their end users.

Alright, I have taken that straight from the available resources out there but let's dive deeper.

In the last 12 months, I have had the pleasure of shadowing several of the proof of concepts that Hydrolix, Akamai and our interested developers (read: existing Akamai customers in a variety of industries) were running.

Getting up and running with Hydrolix TrafficPeak is very easily achieved. The dashboards that come out-of-the-box are easy to use and customizable in Grafana and for someone with severe impatience, lightning fast.

For years, I have been recommending developers to harness the Akamai SIEM functionality. Having full access to all security events directly gives full visibility that is happening at any time, for any of your application or APIs. Actionable intelligence is always important in the world of observability.

However, setting the SIEM API up in a new environment, somewhere turned to be challenging. Not the easiest deployment but Akamai TrafficPeak has made this much easier in order to get started and ingesting security events (or any Akamai logs for that matter).

The built-in filters in the Akamai SIEM dashboards are very helpful and honestly, put our own Web Security Analytics (as great as they already are) to shame.

Understanding security events is an art in and of itself, having done my fair share of 'WAF Reviews' in my Akamai Services days, but having the data at your own fingertips makes it very easy.

Drilling down on the application or microservice (hostname), path, action type (alert or deny), the type of attack group and being able to figure out who and where the potential attack originated from is very helpful.

The ability to customize dashboards as it is all Grafana-based anyway, makes it much easier to fine-tune it to your or your teams specific needs.

All in all, Akamai TrafficPeak is a very helpful solution and one I recommending adding to any DevSecOps-mature team out there. Yes, there are more benefits involved, especially around cost of storage compared to other observability platforms out there, but I will save that for our sales team to highlight and discuss.

Seeing our developers happy and eager to jump on Akamai TrafficPeak in the last twelve months is making it very easy to recommend.

Above, you can find a customer story directly from the Hydrolix website.

If you are interested in adding more Akamai CDN or SIEM observability to your DevOps / DevSecOps infrastructure, definitely get in touch with your existing Akamai account team or with me directly!

And if you are not convinced yet and want some more research, here are helpful links to get you started:

https://hydrolix.io/

https://docs.hydrolix.io/docs/welcome

Before I let you go, here is quick checklist of all the benefits:

• Short data history: It’s too expensive to retain all your data, which forces you to separate “hot” and “cold” data and discard potentially important data. With TrafficPeak, you can retain data for 15+ months, no matter the data size. There is no “cold” data. All data is “hot.”

• Real-time log collection that’s 75% less expensive than other solutions

• Fast search across any/all dimensions (no cold storage)

• Extended data retention (15+ months)

• Streaming video analytics (for media)

• Real-time credential abuse detection (for video)

• Download completion rates (for gaming)

• Enhanced threat detection (for all verticals)

• Predictive maintenance of network: You want to reduce downtime and enhance your user experience. With TrafficPeak, you can analyze data patterns to predict potential failure points and conduct maintenance before those points become disruptive issues.

Thanks to the entire Hydrolix team for making it easier to consume Akamai data at large-scale!