The content delivery service provider is teaming with NetIQ, which acquired WebTrends earlier this year, to offer SiteWise, a service that lets users track and analyze Web site visitors. SiteWise is based on NetIQ's WebTrends Live technology, which is a fully managed, hosted service that provides real-time reports on visitor behavior and preferences. Users add a line of Java code to their Web sites to trigger the data collection, he says, making analysis on a distributed network easier. Akamai, for instance, uses 650 telecommunication networks to support some 9,700 servers in 56 different countries.
Content is distributed across the network and served from the closest servers to the user.
Information such as where visitors come from, which parts of the site they frequent and how long they stay is sent to servers in a NetIQ data center and turned into reports. No personal information is collected, Seacrist says. Akamai's SiteWise customers can access more than 100 types of reports through the Akamai customer portal, which also gives them real-time access to other Akamai services. CIO Doug Cavit is an Akamai customer who also uses WebTrends technology. Akamai parses log files for him to feed into his WebTrends application server.