This month marks the one year anniversary of TrafficPeak’s first customer. During the last year, TrafficPeak, Akamai’s managed observability service powered by Hydrolix, has acquired more than 180 customers. There have been more than 300 trials in 2024 alone with an astounding number converting into customers. The majority of customers who try TrafficPeak, buy TrafficPeak, and it’s because the service solves the economic and performance challenges that often come with observability of massive data sets.
From an economic perspective, many companies allocate a third of their budget for observability. As the amount of data to ingest and store increases, so does the cost, which forces companies to make painful tradeoffs such as discarding or sampling data. From a big data perspective, storing trillions of rows can cost a fortune, and querying all that data can lead to slowdowns and time outs. Companies may move some data to cold storage, but when they need to retrieve that data for incident investigation or root cause analysis, it can take days to get it.
TrafficPeak is solving those problems. The observability service costs 75% less than other providers due to its 25-50x compression and decoupled object storage. By compressing massive amounts of data, Hydrolix reduces costs because there’s less data to store. And because TrafficPeak uses decoupled commodity object storage, customers can scale compute and storage separately, which also reduces costs.
Regarding TrafficPeak’s querying capabilities, all data is hot, which means customers can get sub-second queries even on trillion row datasets and take mitigation action faster. TrafficPeak also has real-time stream processing and can transform data on the fly so you can enrich and standardize your data before it’s stored.
Let’s look at some examples of how companies have used TrafficPeak to ingest, retain, query, and analyze their data in real time.
Global Retail Company
A large electronics retailer wanted visibility into its traffic during Black Friday season, the busiest shopping time of year. The retailer is a longtime Akamai CDN and security customer. Akamai introduced TrafficPeak, suggesting that the company ingest its Akamai CDN and security data into the platform. In a three-month trial, the retailer found and fixed five issues. The retailer then signed a contract right before Black Friday season—just in time to detect and mitigate a massive DDoS attack that spanned 80 countries and 3,000 IP addresses. Because of TrafficPeak, the retailer spotted and mitigated the attack instantly before any customers were impacted. The retailer also used TrafficPeak for post-event root cause analysis and fixed application vulnerabilities.
“TrafficPeak made the attack so visible. We could find all of the data we needed to remedy it quickly before our customers noticed. Without TrafficPeak, we wouldn’t have spotted the attack this early,” said the retailer.
Airline
Compliance mandates required a global airline to store log data for at least a year. However, the costs were extremely high, both in terms of retention and data ingestion. Because the company was sending data to QRadar, they were also paying a high cost based on the number of events per second. The airline lacked a comprehensive view of its data because security and monitoring data were siloed. To overcome those challenges, the airline chose TrafficPeak. It ingested all SIEM and DS2 data into the platform, retained it for at least 15 months, and reduced costs significantly. Akamai also identified and sent the most pertinent events to QRadar, which also cut costs, and unified the airline’s security and monitoring infrastructure to gain a more comprehensive view and reduce incident analysis and resolution times.
“With TrafficPeak, we reduced costs by 70%!” said a business leader at the airline.
Media and Entertainment Company
A media and entertainment company wanted to improve its mean time for detection and resolution of incidents and uncover compromised credentials and shared accounts. The company also sought better visibility into its website’s performance and security. Akamai introduced TrafficPeak and recommended ingesting the company’s CDN and security data into the platform to gain full visibility into its network, servers, and applications. The company integrated both its DS2 and SIEM data. Shortly thereafter, TrafficPeak uncovered a live credential stuffing attack while the media and entertainment company’s IT team was briefing executives. TrafficPeak found shared logins and unauthorized user tokens logging in from 61 countries. It also showed different credentials being tested from different IP addresses, with real-time results updating in the dashboard every thirty seconds. Because the team could see the attack so quickly, it was able to take mitigation action immediately.
“When an executive saw the live credential stuffing attack, identified by TrafficPeak, he walked out of the business meeting and called the legal department,” said the company’s IT leader.
Gaming Company
A gaming company wanted visibility into its quality of service for a new game release. The company had massive amounts of data and was spending millions of dollars to sample it. They lacked visibility into the data and wanted to quickly extract specific insights related to the business, so they tried TrafficPeak. During the new game release, TrafficPeak spotted a massive spike in errors from one country. The errors were flagged so quickly that the company mitigated them in real time before any users noticed. TrafficPeak also retained all data for at least 15 months at a much lower cost, which meant sampling was no longer needed. With TrafficPeak, the gaming company gained full visibility into its data, extracted game ID data quickly, and drilled down into geolocation and other insights.
“With TrafficPeak, we discovered a deep level of visibility into our data, which we used to fix errors immediately,” said the company.
Bank
A global bank wanted real-time monitoring of its banking and other applications. It sought to better understand the source of performance issues. The bank considered Splunk, but the costs were too high. It chose TrafficPeak due to its real-time monitoring capabilities and costs that were 75% lower than Splunk. The bank easily integrated its Akamai CDN and other data with TrafficPeak, allowing them to find and fix the source of performance issues immediately.
“TrafficPeak is the first source of truth for us. We get all of our performance insights from the service, and at a reduced cost,” said the bank.
Next Steps
Happy one-year anniversary to TrafficPeak! TrafficPeak makes it economically viable to process trillions of log data, query that data with sub-second latency, and significantly improve the mean time from detection to mitigation of security and performance issues.
Read a more detailed example of how TrafficPeak helped a large airline spot DDoS attacks , credential stuffing, and other types of attacks while visualizing its DS2 and SIEM data in one, unified view.
