Use these settings to maintain site availability and protect the user experience when your origin server or third-party services are slow or unresponsive.

Failover Template

Configure how Akamai edge servers respond when the origin is slow or unreachable.

Origin Health Detection

Recommended

Enabled by default, it monitors the health of your origin's IP addresses to prevent edge servers from repeatedly attempting to connect to a failing IP.

Akamai preconfigures these settings for Ion based on performance best practices:

Field	Setting	Description
Origin retry count	3	The number of consecutive failures before an IP is marked "faulty."
Origin retry interval	10 seconds	How long an edge server waits before testing a faulty IP again.
Origin maximum reconnects	2	The total attempts an edge server makes across all available origin IPs.

To learn more, see Origin Health Detection.

Simulate failover

This setting tests your Site Failover configuration without actually taking your origin offline. It is preset to only run on the staging network and will never execute in production.

By default it executes only if the request is on the staging network and contains a specific a Request header that includes the breakconnection entry that's set to Your-Secret-Here.

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The value Your-Secret-Here is a placeholder. For security, change this to a unique, private string in your template before testing.

When both criteria match, Akamai applies the Break Forward Connection dropping the forward connection to the origin and forcing the Site Failover settings to trigger so you can verify they work as intended.

Failover

Select your preferred failover action, such as redirecting to a backup origin or serving a static file from Akamai NetStorage.

To learn more, see Site Failover.