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

What it does

Breadcrumbs lets Akamai quickly do two things:

Help you troubleshoot problems. When troubleshooting an issue, you typically need to 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 gives us 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.
Leverage Breadcrumbs data. If your site or app can support it, you can configure it to get real-time insight regarding the Akamai network. Breadcrumbs data includes network health and the location in the Akamai network ("geo") used to serve content. You can collect this data from your site or app in a central location for review.

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You may not always identify the actual root cause of an issue with breadcrumbs data.

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.