Akamai and Sumo Logic integrate for real-time application insights!

I’m very pleased to announce our strategic alliance with Akamai. Our integrated solution delivers a unified view of application availability, performance, security, and business analytics based on application log data.  Customers who rely on Akamai’s globally distributed infrastructure now can get the real-time feed of all logs generated by Akamai’s infrastructure into their Sumo Logic account in order to integrate and cross-analyze them with their internally generated application data sets!

What problems does the integrated solution solve?

To date, there have been two machine data sets generated by applications that leverage Akamai:

1. Application logs at the origin data centers, which application owners can usually access.

2. Logs generated by Akamai as an application is distributed globally. Application owners typically have zero or limited access to these logs.

Both of these data sets provide important metrics and insights for delivering highly-available, secure applications that also provide detailed view of business results. Until today there was no way to get these data sets into a single tool for real-time analysis, causing the following issues:

• No single view of performance. While origin performance could be monitored, but that provides little confidence that the app is performant for end users.
• Difficult to understand user interaction. Without data on how real users interact with an application, it was difficult to gauge how users interacted with the app, what content was served, and ultimately how the app performed for those users (and if performance had any impact on conversions).
• Issues impacting customer experience remained hidden. The root cause of end-user issues  caused at the origin remained hidden, impacting customer experience for long periods of time.
• Web App Firewall (WAF) security information not readily available. Security teams were not able to detect and respond to attacks in real-time and take defensive actions to minimize exposure.

The solution!

Akamai Cloud Monitor and Sumo Logic provide an integrated approach to solving these problems. Sumo Logic has developed an application specifically crafted for customers to extract insights from their Akamai data, which is sent to Sumo Logic in real time.  The solution has been deployed by joint customers (at terabyte scale) to address the following use cases:

• Real-time analytics about user behavior.  Combine Akamai real-user monitoring data and internal data sets to gain granular insights into user behavior. For example, learn how users behave across different device types, geographies, or even how Akamai quality of service impacts user behavior and business results.

• Security information management and forensics. Security incidents and attacks on an application can be investigated by deep-diving into sessions, IP addresses, and individual URLs that attackers are attempting to exploit and breach.

• Application performance management from edge to origin. Quickly determine if an application’s performance issue is caused by your origin or by Akamai’s infrastructure, and which regions, user agents, or devices are impacted.

• Application release and quality management. Receive an alert as soon as Akamai detects that one or more origins have an elevated number of 4xx or 5xx errors that may be caused by new code push, configuration change, or another issue within your origin application infrastructure.

• Impact of quality of service and operational excellence. Correlate how quality of service impacts conversions or other business metrics to optimize performance and drive better results

I could go on, but I’m sure you have plenty of ideas of your own.

Join us for a free trial here – as always, there is nothing to install, nothing to manage, nothing to run – we do it all for you.  You can also read our announcement here or read more about the Sumo Logic application for Akamai here.  Take a look at the Akamai press release here.