By default, data used to plot analytics charts and to decide routing decisions comes from the community data pool. Community data are collected from and shared by all users. Although this data is enormous, it usually cannot accurately represent the actual situation of a specific user’s domain.
With this, VNIS introduce Monitor Integration wherein users can add their private monitoring system (a.k.a. “Monitor”) to collect and monitor data specifically for their domain and store these data in their own private data pool.
One way of creating a Monitor is through creating a Monitoring CDN. Monitoring CDN is your private CDN created with the purpose of collecting and monitoring data specific to the user’s domain through the actual delivery network it created together with your domain. In this way, the data it will gather will provide more accurate and targeted insights which will directly reflect the performance of your domain.
Step 1: Create Monitoring CDN
To create a Monitoring CDN, navigate to ‘ DEM’ > ‘Monitor Integration’.
You need to set the target domain from the ‘ Operation level panel’.
On the ‘Monitor Integration’ page, click the ‘ Add Monitoring CDN’ button.
To add Monitoring CDN, you need to fill up the following information:
- Monitoring CDN Name: this name will be used to identify this Monitoring CDN.
- Origin Address: this specifies the location of the origin to which the CDN will be connected to. You can input either FQDN or IPv4.
- CDN: this specifies the CDN where the performance and availability data will be measured. Only CDNs installed and activated on a domain will be available.
- Hostname: this specifies the domain in which the performance and availability data will be measured. This field is optional and should be filled up when your origin enables a virtual server (you can input a custom value e.g. abc.com), else you can leave the field empty.
- Test object: this is a test image file (i.e. mlytics.gif) that will be used to measure the performance and availability data. You need to download this file and upload it to your origin.
- Test object path: this specifies the path in your origin where the test object should be uploaded. You may allow the CDN to cache (or not cache) the test object by checking (unchecking) the box. (e.g./images/mlytics.gif)
Once you finished filling up the information, click the ‘Save’ button to create the Monitoring CDN.
Checking the cache option will make the Monitoring CDN provide ‘Static data’, while unchecking it will provide ‘Dynamic data’.
Step 2: Enable Monitoring CDN
To enable Monitoring CDN, navigate to ‘ DEM’ > ‘Data Feeds’.
You need to set the target domain from the ‘ Operation level panel’.
First, select the type of data feed to ‘ Dynamic’.
Then, check the dropdown menu for a given CDN. For example, if the Monitoring CDN you created uses GMA as its CDN, then you can search it under the data feed of the GMA CDN provider.
After you find the name of your Monitoring CDN, select it to enable.
Once enabled, the performance and availability data through the selected CDN (e.g. Akamai) will be collected and monitored by this Monitoring CDN.
Below illustrates how data is collected and monitored before and after adding a Monitoring CDN.
Once a user opted to use a Monitoring CDN, if the data points collected from the Monitoring CDN are insufficient, the Analytics and Smart Load Balancing we still use the data from the Monitoring CDN and will not fall back on using the data from the Community data pool. In short, users need to manually switch their desired data feed if they want to use data from that data feed.
Step 3: Manage Monitoring CDN
To manage all your Monitoring CDN, navigate to ‘ DEM’ > ‘Monitor Integration’.
You need to set the target domain from the ‘ Operation level panel’.
On this page, you will see several information and controls for all the Monitoring CDN you created.
- Monitoring CDN Name: this is the name that you assign for the specified Monitoring CDN.
- CDN: this is the CDN used by specified the Monitoring CDN to measure the performance and availability data.
-
Status: this shows the status of the
specified Monitoring CDN.
- Installing - the Monitoring CDN is being installed.
- Deploying - the Monitoring CDN is being deployed.
- Complete - the Monitoring CDN is successfully created and ready to use.
- Polls: this is the number of times that the waver measures and collects performance and availability data from the delivery network/data feed created by the specified Monitoring CDN.
- Chart icon: clicking this icon will direct you to Pulse analytics.
- Pen icon: clicking this icon will let you edit the configurations of the specified Monitoring CDN.
- Trash icon: clicking this icon will delete the specified Monitoring CDN.