Liveness Checks

Liveness Checks provides analytics to verify the availability of targeted assets in your protected subnets. It uses constant TCP/HTTP probing from multiple locations globally across the Prolexic infrastructure to gather asset availability data, which allows your operations teams to quickly identify failures for critical assets as well as “prove” that your environments are reachable from the Prolexic network and that Akamai is not interfering with or blocking network access.

The probes are run on a 1 minute interval. Aggregated data is displayed in the Akamai Control Center based on the time range chosen.

More network observability and analytics tools coming in this project will enable you to investigate network issues easier than ever before.

Key Capabilities

Target Monitoring

Verifies basic availability of the selected targets to immediately spot network failures.

Failure Detection

Failure count and failure rate statistics to detect connectivity failures to your targets.

Network Congestion Identification

Response time calculations for every probe sent displayed as a time-series graph to indicate possible network congestion.

Time-bound Verification

Specify a time range from 5 minutes to 30 days, or use several predefined periods (e.g. yesterday, last 7 days, etc.)

Dashboards

Liveness Checks consists of five distinct dashboards:

Summary
Status
Success Rate over Time
Details
Response Time

You can access Liveness Checks by logging in to the Control Center:
Go to ☰ > Common Services > Reports
In the Reports menu, select Prolexic > Liveness Checks

See How to use reports for more information.

You can access the network data for each dashboard using other methods:

Download a CSV file from each dashboard
Display API calls to consume the data for a specific dashboard.

Filtering

Start with the Select filters tab, where you choose the data that you want to view.
Required filters:

Date range - The time range for which the data will be displayed.
Targets - the targets defined for monitoring. One or more can be selected to display data.

Note: To use Liveness Checks, contact our Professional Services team to configure targets to be monitored.

You can access the network data for each dashboard using other methods:
Download a CSV file from each dashboard
Display API calls to consume the data for a specific dashboard.

Summary

This section provides a quick overview of all liveness checks running, presenting basic statistics (e.g. number of tests, response time, etc.).

Status

This is the most important section, containing targets configured for tests. Each target has three metrics with a success percentage from each region: EMEA, APAC, AMER.
The percentage test results are calculated based on aggregated values from all Scrubbing Centers (SCs) inside each region. For instance, 90% means that ‘success’ was received from 9 out of 10 SCs in a specific region (i.e. the target is reachable from 9 SCs)

Success Rate Over Time

This Time-Series section represents the target availability on a chart. It visualizes the data to help identify network problems - whenever the value drops below 100% it may indicate some kind of failure.The data is displayed separately for each target monitored from each region, resulting in 3 entries per target.
The chart provides the option to disable / enable specific flows (target + region). This helps you to focus only on instances that you are interested in. The data granularity for the graph depends on the time range chosen in the filter and varies from 1 minute to 1 day.

Details

Details table enables a deep dive into configured targets by displaying these metrics:

Average Response Time - average response time for specific target in a selected time range
Total Checks - the number of checks performed (success and failures)
Failure Count - the number of failed checks
Failure Rate - the failure percentage, as a ratio of Failure Count/Total Checks

Average Response Time

This Time-Series section represents the target response time on a chart. It visualizes the data to help identify network problems - whenever any sudden spike happens it may indicate some kind of network problems (presumably, a congestion).The data is displayed separately for each target monitored from each region, resulting in 3 entries per target.
The chart provides the option to disable or enable specific flows (target + region). This helps you to focus only on instances that you are interested in. The data granularity for the graph depends on the time range chosen in the filter and varies from 1 minute to 1 day.