Set up Increase availability

Configure this sub-rule to control how to handle responses to requests when your origin or third-party entities are slow, or even down. This can help minimize a negative impact on user experience.

Simulate failover

Optional (This is only applicable if you enable Site Failover.)

This rule lets you simulate an origin connection problem and test your Site Failover configuration on Akamai's staging network.

How it works

This rule's Criteria is a little complex. Once all of its settings are met, the Break Forward Connection behavior is applied. Here's an example of how it works:

A request comes in for your property.
To start, the rule's "If" argument will only apply if the request is served through the Akamai staging network. If you've promoted your property to Production, this rule won't apply.
The rule will also check a request for a Request header that includes the breakconnection entry that's set to Your-Secret-Here. So, you need to ensure a request to activate this rule includes this header.
With both Criteria met, the Break Forward Connection behavior is applied. This simulates an origin connection problem, so you can test what you've got set up for the Site Failover sub-rule.

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You don't actually need to do anything with this sub-rule. It only applies if you enable Site Failover. Also, it's only used for testing and has no bearing on the regular delivery of your Ion content. If you want to use it, understand that the Your-Secret-Here is here as a placeholder. You can leave it here and use it in the breakconnection entry, but we recommend that you provide a unique, custom value in its place.

Site failover

Optional

Use this rule to decide how edge servers should respond when your origin server isn't available.

Set the Criteria

You can set the "If" argument for this rule to one of two settings:

Origin Timeout (default). Set to yes. This will match on requests when the origin fails to respond due to a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) timeout. The length of this timeout can vary, based on the type of origin server you have in place.
Response Status Code. Use this criterion to match on requests based on the HTTP response code that's served to the client.

Set up the Site Failover behavior

You can select from several different failover actions. These aren't unique to Ion. See the help for this behavior in the Property Manager documentation for information on each.

Test with Simulate Failover

If you enable Site Failover, we recommend that you test it using the Simulate Failover sub-rule. To do so:

Review how Simulate Failover is set up. Specifically, you need the value set for the Request Header portion of the Criteria. This defaults to Your-Secret-Here.
Get set up for testing. Specifically, you need to activate your Ion property on Akamai's staging network.
Make a request to your property hostname. The request needs to include the Request header that includes the breakconnection entry that's set to the value noted in step 1.

This will apply the Simulate Failover rule, which creates a breaking condition and applies what you've set here for Site Failover.

Origin health

Recommended

This rule helps you monitor the health of your origin by tracking unsuccessful IP connection attempts. This can be useful if you want to reduce the number of hits to your origin when the IP addresses used to access it are faulty or unavailable.

For more details on this behavior and its use, see the Property Manager documentation for it.

Specifics for Ion

The Origin Health Detection behavior in this rule has been preconfigured with best practices settings. While you can change them, these are the settings we recommend.

Field	Default Ion setting	Sub-options
Retry Count	3	Akamai edge servers will mark an IP address associated with your origin as faulty after this number of consecutive connection failures.
Retry Interval	10 (seconds)	An edge server will wait this number of seconds before trying to reconnect to an IP address it has already identified as faulty.
Maximum Reconnects	3	An edge server will contact your origin server this number of times. If your origin is associated with several IP addresses, this value overrides the value of Retry Count.

Script management

Optional

Script Management is a suite of tools to help you minimize performance degradation from third-party JavaScripts. Use it to gather metrics information on script usage and then build a policy to block or defer problematic scripts.

There are various prerequisites you need to meet as well as other things you need to do outside of your Ion property. To help, we've put together a tutorial that walks you through the entire process.