The "Breadcrumbs" feature looks to improve real-time visibility of performance-impacting and error conditions for media downloads with Download Delivery.

What it does

Breadcrumbs lets ​Akamai​ quickly do two things:

1. Help you troubleshoot problems. Troubleshooting a delivery issue typically requires that you contact us and provide client-side and ​Akamai​ edge IP information. We consult log information, along with some amount of back and forth communication to diagnose the issue. Breadcrumbs provides more real-time visibility into the Akamai network, to better help us in troubleshooting your issues. While ​Akamai​ customer support can simply look at a specific line in a specific log file to identify a problem, they have to locate this "specific" content in the logs. With Breadcrumbs, a potential problem is specifically written as a "breadcrumbs" line in the logs, making it easier to locate.

2. Leverage Breadcrumbs data via your player. If your delivery application can support it, you can configure it to get real-time insight regarding the ​Akamai​ network. Breadcrumbs includes data such as network health and the location in the ​Akamai​ network ("geo") used to serve content. You can aggregate this data from your player to a central location for review.

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The actual root cause of an issue may not always be identifiable via breadcrumbs.

The bottom line

The Breadcrumbs service provides per HTTP transaction visibility into the ​Akamai​ platform, regardless of how deep within that platform, and simplifies log review for troubleshooting.

How to set up Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs is available for use with several ​Akamai​​ products, and its configuration is the same for all of them. See the Property Manager documentation for full usage instructions.