Bot Reporting: 4 Key Differences to Consider

Some bot management solutions prioritize simplified reports over deep insights or actionability. Akamai’s approach is different, and it’s aligned closely with the needs of our customers. Akamai protects the largest, most targeted brands around the world. These businesses often see novel attacks first, so their expectations for detection efficacy are extremely high. 

In addition, an integral part of mitigating these novel attacks is having deep, actionable insights because you can’t fight what you don’t understand. Let’s look at the ways good bot reporting can be used to accelerate your response to an attack and avoid future attacks.

There are four key factors that distinguish Akamai’s bot reporting, including:

1. Real-time insights for the highest impact

2. A dataset with dozens of dimensions to help further educate customers 

3. Predefined reports for the best of both worlds

4. Decision-making support beyond “Should I block this?”

The best reporting won’t help if the data is old or inaccurate. Akamai’s reporting is in real time across all our available reports, allowing customers up-to-the-minute access to data that can help them make decisions that can stop or avoid an attack at the time when those decisions will have the most impact.

Security teams that use our solution consistently rave about the depth and richness of our bot reporting. Any solution can tell you how many bots were blocked or went through. But if you want deeper insights — such as which specific detections a bot triggered — no one does it better than Akamai. 

Bot Manager offers 55 bot-specific dimensions, including Bot Score, rule combination, user-agent, AS number, header set, and TLS hash, among others. Another 11 dimensions are included with Akamai Account Protector. Akamai customers can find more details in the documentation.

By knowing the details of bot requests, our customers can become more knowledgeable about how to fight the bots. This matters, especially to our highly targeted customers; they’ve become experts in bots and they use the insights from Bot Manager to get smarter and stronger when fighting the bad bots.

In addition to being deeply customizable, Akamai Bot Manager comes with predefined reports that are simple to use without any configuration or filtering. They serve as a starting point for in-depth analysis. Bot Manager offers one-click reports for all bot products/use cases.

Our bot reporting provides detailed, specific insights to inform actions, such as tuning decisions to optimize protection. The types of tuning decisions that customers can make based on our reporting include:

• Identifying detection spikes to investigate further; for example, what pages are being attacked and how
• Diagnosing false positives
• Updating web application firewall (WAF) and bot configurations

Akamai was a pioneer in the bot detection management space and we continue to make significant investments in our technology and our teams. Over the years, we have gained a deep understanding of what our customers need and want in their bot management partner — and our reporting is a critical part of giving customers an edge in the battle against bad bots.