Real-time data collection and monitoring. Akamai‘s Query system is a distributed real-time relational database that allows for near real-time monitoring of status information across the distributed network. Status data is provided by nearly every software component in the Akamai platform in the form of table rows, and these rows are then aggregated into thousands of tables within the Query system. Query supports a standard SQL interface for enabling arbitrary, ad- hoc queries on the data, rather than having to define questions of interest ahead of time. We refer the interested reader to [36] for more information on Query‘s architecture and capabilities. Akamai makes heavy use of Query for both monitoring and alerting. For example, network-wide invariants can be expressed as SQL statements (e.g., ―no more than N machines should be exhibiting some system behavior within a geographic region at the same time as some other system behavior is occurring) with any returned rows resulting in alerts for further investigation within our operations centers. Other SQL statements (e.g., ―95 th percentile of resource utilization by certain processes, broken down by type of hardware and software version) can be used to extract complex aspects of system state for trending and analysis.
