Release Notes:  Announcing Simplified Product Onboarding

Over the next few months we will be rolling out a new, simplified setup process for Akamai products.

What it is

A new setup process that allows customers to get up and running with multiple product combinations, quickly and easily. The process takes you through product selection, prerequisites, basic “Hello World” product settings, activating the settings to the Akamai Edge Platform, testing and go-live, and finally directs you to the individual configuration tools where you can access the full product experience.

The new setup process is initiated from a new Get Started section on the Akamai Control Center home page as well as from a redesigned Create Property page.

Which products

The initial launch will include the Ion and DSA web performance products and the Web Application Protector security solution. Additional products will be added over time.

Who will see it

Initially, a percentage of new customers and trials will see it. We will expand this to existing customers and partners with the supported products over the next few months.

What you need to do

The new setup process is completely optional. You can continue to use all of your existing configuration tools directly. The Onboard and Configuration Assistant (OCA) will be retired towards the end of the year, but all existing OCA configurations will continue to work and will be automatically transitioned.

Release Notes:  Property Manager

New Features:

• Create Property Page.  We will be rolling out a redesigned Create Property page over the next few months, starting with new customers and trials.  Functionality remains largely the same as before but the look and feel is different, and we’re introducing a new guided setup wizard that will eventually replace Onboard and Configuration Assistant (OCA).

Bug Fixes:

• Caching: This release contains a fix for a situation when a property specifies the Caching behavior in multiple rules. When one rule has the Caching behavior configured with Caching Option Honor Origin Cache-Control or Honor Origin Cache-Control and Expires, and Honor Private is set to Yes, and a second rule has the Caching behavior configured with the Caching Option Cache and a defined Max-age time configured for the same object, the following issues could occur:

  • The content at the Tier Distribution parent is never revalidated with the origin, and so remains stale, also known as an infinite cache.
  • Cacheable content at the Edge is treated as no-store.

• Several PAPI 500 errors have been converted to more appropriate 4XX error codes.  This is part of an ongoing effort to improve the PAPI developer experience.

• Miscellaneous bug fixes and performance improvements.

The latest update to Reporting includes the following enhancements:

Report Families Alignment

The WebHelp “Reports overview” section is aligned with Report Families visible in the Akamai Control Center. Additionally, Report Families are now sorted alphabetically in the report dropdown, with the exception of Traffic Reports, which are on the top of the list. 

Sort CP Codes by Name

You can now sort CP codes by Name in the Report Filter section, with the Name as default sorting option.

Granularity updates * Additional titles to widgets names indicating AVERAGE report data rollup are available.  * In Scheduled Reports, a new option to CSV deliveries is available: “Deliver at lowest available time interval”. Once the option is checked, the report will be delivered at lowest possible granularity for the given report. 

Full screen display

You can display reports in the full screen mode.

The latest update for the Diagnostic tools release includes:

• Support for MTR results in the View User Diagnostic Data tool.
• Support for the View User Diagnostic Data tool API. The API documentation can be found here.
• Minor UI improvements to offer better user experience.
• Bug fixes.

We are glad to announce that based on our user feedback, we are introducing a number of improvements to our reporting interface. 

Download CSV

We’re making it easier to download datasets in CSV format by clicking the “Export CSV” icon, which you can find next to most widgets. This will download the data directly to your browser.

Sharing Filter Settings

We are allowing filter settings like CP codes and date ranges to be embedded in the URL.

API Guidance

We’re introducing a new “API calls” icon for most report widgets available for users with API access. This icon opens a modal that shows the exact API call you can use to fetch the report data that you’re seeing in the UI. We also provide a link to the relevant API documentation for more guidance, making it even easier to start integrating with our API’s.

KPI units of measure

We’ve been using scientific prefixes in some of our KPI’s, which has led to confusion in some cases (most notable, we’ve used ‘G’ for ‘Giga’, that is billion). We are switching to using the full units spelled out where possible (for example, “billion”), and will be using editorial abbreviations (for example “B”) where needed. Volumetric units like “Gigabyte” will continue to be abbreviated as current (that is “GB”).

Release Notes:  Property Manager

New Features:

• PAPI Pagination.  Added pagination option to property version call.  This will allow customers who have a large number of versions to return a subset, improving performance of the PAPI call.
• GraphQL Caching Behavior.  Now available for Dynamic Site Accelerator.
• CORS Protocol Support Behavior.  New Property Manager Behavior for CORS support.  

Improvements:

• Origin Characteristics Key Size Increased.  Increase Google Cloud Storage access key size from 24 to 128.
• Property Group Listing Page Performance Optimization.  For Configuration Manager configs, the upgrade button in the property group listing page is now grayed out.  Click on the property and you will see the upgrade button to upgrade to Property Manager.

Bug Fixes:

• Several PAPI 500 errors have been converted to more appropriate 4XX error codes.  This is part of an ongoing effort to improve the PAPI developer experience.
• Object Caching bug fix in the upgrade function. 
• Miscellaneous bug fixes and performance improvements.

Identity and Access Management email notifications

The frequency of expiration email notifications for user passwords and API client credentials are reduced. Instead of sending daily emails starting 21 days before expiration, emails are now sent on day 21, 14, 7, 6, 5 ,4, 3, 2, and 1 day before the password or credential’s expiration date.

We are pleased to announce the release of the new diagnostic tool called View User Diagnostic Data. This tool is used to collect diagnostic data for a specific end user and create a support case to troubleshoot content delivery issues, enhance fault isolation, and perform root-cause analysis in the production environment. You can read more about it in the View end user diagnostic data tool documentation.

View User IP Details and Get User IP Details tools are deprecated and will soon become unavailable. You can use the new View User Diagnostic Data tool instead.

The View User Diagnostic Data tool enables you to:

• Create a group to collect diagnostic data of multiple end users under it.

• Generate a message with a link. When an end user clicks the link, the tool gathers the following diagnostics data required to troubleshoot a problem:

  • Timestamp (Epoch Time).

  • Connected Cipher.

  • Cookies (Enabled - Y/N).

  • Protocol.

  • UserAgent.

  • Preferred Client IP.

  • Client IPv4/IPv6.

  • Client DNS IPv4/IPv6.

  • Edge IPs.

• View the progress of collecting the data. There are three status of the link:

  • Active.

  • Expired.

  • Max limit reached.

• View results after the data is collected and select rows that you need to troubleshoot.

• Attach the end users’ diagnostic data to a support case.

• Export a .csv file with the end user diagnostic data to your computer.

We are pleased to announce the limited availability release of Test Center 2.0. With this release we introduce the functional testing capability. With functional testing, you can assert expected conditions to positively confirm that a new business requirement or config version will behave as intended. You can read more about it in the Test Center documentation.

The latest update for Test Center 2.0 enables you to:

• Select, create, modify, and delete single or multiple test objects (requirements, config versions, test suites, test cases, conditions, test request, client profiles).

• Evaluate the following criteria on the HTTP response corresponding to the test request or a specific config setting applied to the test request:

  • Response Code.

  • Response Header.

  • Content Provider Code (CP Code).

  • Caching Option.

  • Cache Key Query Parameters.

  • Ignore Case in Cache Key.

  • Origin Server.

  • Metadata Variables (Variables).

  • Redirect.

  • Last Mile Acceleration.

  • Tiered Distribution.

  • Log Request Details.

  • Prefetch Objects.

  • SureRoute.

• Include different types of primary testing objects, comparative and functional, in the same test run.

• Execute a test run, check its progress, and view test results.

• Check a list of included primary testing objects in the test run and show the corresponding result information.

• Configure stateful test suites.

  • When executing a stateful test suite, maintain browser cookies between the test cases included in it.

  • When configuring a stateful test suite, constrain all test cases to use the same client profile.

  • Allow reordering of the included test cases.

• Integrate with Event Viewer:

  • Expose appropriate event types through Event Viewer.

  • Log key events in Event Viewer.

  • Log key user actions in a recent activity audit trail.

• Clone test objects (test suites, test cases, conditions, and test requests) based on the object type and relational constraints between them.

• Access all functional testing capabilities using open API. The API documentation can be accessed here: Test Center API.

Enhancements in Identity and Access Management Application

• Updated email content with clearer instructions for email change process.
• Removed unused permission “IDM: Settings - Admin Access”.
• Bug fixes.