As the old saying goes, knowing is half the battle. But when it comes to running a modern digital enterprise, it’s more like the whole battle. A company lives and dies based on the rapport it manages to achieve with its customers, and in the impersonal world of the internet, you can’t achieve that with a handshake and a smile. Your website and web presence is the digital face of your company, and if any aspect of it is ill-conceived or poorly optimized, far too many customers aren’t going to be able to see past the rough exterior to the great product offering underneath, no matter how game-changing it may be.
Now, naturally if you want to optimize your web presence, you need tools built to… well… optimize your web presence. And Azion continues to work to provide powerful low-latency solutions to these needs. But unfortunately that’s not enough on its own. Because at the end of the day, generalized market research will only ever produce generic results. It’s easy to learn what customers generally want, but you need to learn what your specific customer wants from your enterprise. It’s kind of like putting on makeup. You can buy all the fancy cosmetics you want, but in order to properly make use of it, you need a mirror to ensure that you are applying it in a way that is optimal for your specific face. (And if you can’t relate to makeup metaphors, then imagine instead that you’re shaving that great big lumberjack beard of yours. Either way, you’re going to want a mirror.)
The mirror, in this case, is a top-quality analytics tool. There’s no one product that can cover every base, but a properly integrated array of analytics tools can provide exactly the finesse and monitoring power to generate business strategy defining market insights. Here at Azion, we’ve developed a comprehensive analytics suite of tools that synergize together to convert your raw data into actionable insights. Here’s an introductory run-down on some of Azion’s most powerful analytics tools, their specializations, and how they work together in support of a larger data-driven strategic philosophy.
Real-Time Metrics
As its name suggests, Real-Time Metrics is an evaluative tool built to provide access to the inner workings of your platform and applications, and organize the data it receives under any of several dozen possible metrics. Fully integratable with both Azion and third party applications, Real-Time Metrics is all about high-level transparency. Since it tracks the behavior and performance of applications, Real-Time Metrics provides access to a constantly updating, centralized and accessible information repository, making it easy to keep tabs on the security and reliability of your applications and origins. By filtering this data through the metrics most pertinent to your needs, Real-Time Metrics simplifies performance optimization for a broad range of use cases, including correcting connectivity issues, highlighting infrastructural pain points, and even identifying the root causes for more serious service disruptions. All of this ultimately boils down to gaining a better understanding of your own vulnerabilities and needs, through a better understanding of your data. Because of the sprawling, generalist nature of Real-Time Metrics, you don’t always even need to know what you’re looking for. Simply by searching through your data using Real-Time Metrics’ parameters, you’ll find yourself bumping into insights that you never expected to find.
Real-Time Events
While Real-Time Metrics is a potent generalist tool, Real-Time Events is much more targeted in its approach. It runs on a complex query system, where the user creates a sophisticated, focused query to seek out the answers to specific key questions. The query is launched into the same mass of data that Real-Time Metrics feeds from, but its greater singularity of purpose enables it to collect fine-grain details in pursuit of its answer. If Real-Time Metrics is a telescope, looking over your whole digital universe, then Real-Time Events is a microscope, offering a laser-focused view of singular, isolated events. Real-Time Events is the perfect tool, when you know exactly what question you want to ask. If you want detailed analysis of the effectiveness of your security against a specific attack on your system, or seek a deep dive into the performance of a particular application fulfilling a particular role, then Real-Time Events is the tool for the job. It’s queries resolve fast, and thanks to an incredibly intuitive user interface, all that it requires is inputting the data specs and pressing a search button. More popular queries can also be saved for later use, further streamlining the analytics process.
Edge Pulse
Edge Pulse is powered by Real-Time Events, and uses similar principles, but flips the angle it views data from, focusing on user experience and the customer side of things. With Edge Pulse enabled, customers accessing your applications generate real user monitoring data, offering insights into consumer trends as well as highlighting areas where customer attention wavers. While Real-Time Metrics and Real-Time Events offer insights into your application performance, Edge Pulse provides insights into the perception of your application performance, which is just as vital. Ultimately, Edge Pulse is about maximizing customer satisfaction. The better you understand your customers, the more you will be able to provide for their needs.
Together, Edge Pulse, Real-Time Metrics, and Real-Time events provide a nexus of data analytics capabilities, able to provide rich and complex insights from a multitude of angles and focuses. As a product suite, they represent Azion’s belief in system transparency. You should always be able to see what is happening in your system, and why it is happening, in real time.
Data Stream
Of course, analytics tools are only as good as the data that feeds them, and that’s where Data Stream comes in. Azion Data Stream is an analytics enablement tool, providing consistent and fault-tolerant real-time data delivery to support and empower our own and third party data analytics tools. Designed to service the needs of our own edge platform, Azion Data Stream is built to handle the raw data generated by thousands of edge nodes, giving it impressive storage and processing power. Plus, it’s equipped with state of the art, end-to-end encryption, ensuring that all of that data remains accessible to you and only you.
Summary
Analytics can never be an afterthought. It is absolutely vital to the health and viability of any web enterprise, and any business that wants to get serious with their web presence. Analytics tools are the eyes into your network, providing visibility both for the inner workings of your applications, and the equally crucial surface interactions between website and customer. If you’re ready to modernize your analytics capabilities, Azion’s sophisticated suite of edge compatible tools offers both cutting edge data delivery and the power to interpret all that raw data using a broad array of custom-built metrics and system queries, providing the answers you seek in understanding your website, your customers, and the future of your business.
