In addition to being accessible via Fastly's application programming interface (API), Fastly services can also be accessed via a web interface for users with the appropriate access permissions.
NOTE: Not all Fastly service features are enabled by default. The appearance of the web interface controls may change from the defaults displayed once these services are enabled for your account.
Access to Fastly's web interface controls
Access to Fastly's web interface controls requires you to sign up for a Fastly account. Creating an account is free. Once you've created an account, you can navigate to the controls via the Fastly login page at https://manage.fastly.com, either directly using any standard web browser or by clicking the Login link at the top right of almost all pages at the Fastly website.
Once logged in to a Fastly account, the web interface controls appear as appropriate based on the roles and permissions assigned to you.
The default control groups appear as follows from left to right across the top of the interface:
- the All services (Home) page
- the Stats page
- the Configure controls
- the user menu
About the All services page
The All services page displays a summary of all your services, sorted by requests per second. It appears automatically when users with the appropriate access permissions log in to the Fastly web interface. You can access it by clicking Home next to the stopwatch icon.
The All services page allows you to:
- access the real-time stats information for a particular service by clicking the Real-time Stats link under the service name
- open the current configuration settings for a service by clicking the active version number in the Configuration column
- view the number of requests received per second for a service in the Requests Per Second column
- view small graphs of the total number of requests received for a service over a two hour period in the Last 2 Hours of Requests column
You can also search for a specific service associated with a domain by typing the domain name in the Search by domain field. The domain name you type must be an exact match to find the desired service.
About the Stats page
The Stats page provides you the capability to monitor your real-time analytics and view your historical caching statistics for your services on the web interface.
From here, you can access the:
- Real-time stats information, which allows you to monitor cache activity for your services.
- Historic stats information, which displays your historical stats derived from your site’s statistical information.
The Stats link appears automatically for logged in users with the appropriate access permissions.
Viewing the Real-time stats
The Real-time stats page allows you to separately monitor caching for each of your services in real time, as they operate on a second-by-second basis.
The data on this page may appear grayed out or blank to some users, with no information displayed in the controls, when a customer's service does not receive enough requests for Fastly to display meaningful information about it in real time. If you've just created your service, you might see a message saying there's nothing to see yet.
In addition to a menu allowing you to select the specific datacenter from which to view data (it defaults to data from all datacenters), the top of the dashboard includes the following real-time cache activity:
- Hits: the number of times requested data is found in cache
- Hit Time: the amount of time spent processing cache hits
- Misses: the number of times requested data is not found in cache
- Hit Ratio: the percentage of content being accessed that is currently cached by Fastly, defined as the proportion of cache hits to all cacheable content (hits + misses)
- Miss Time: the amount of time spent processing cache misses
- Requests: the total number of requests received for your site by Fastly
- Errors: the number of error requests that occurred
Below the real-time cache activity summary data, several graphs appear:
The graphed cache activity includes:
- Global POP Traffic: a heat map displaying global POP traffic through all POPs for your service.
- Requests: a graph displaying the total number of requests received for your site by Fastly over time.
- Errors: a graph displaying the number of error requests that occurred over time.
- Hit Ratio: a graph displaying the percentage of content being accessed that is currently cached by Fastly over time.
- Bandwidth: a graph displaying the bandwidth served from Fastly's servers to your website's visitors.
- Image Optimization Requests: when enabled, a graph displaying the number of responses that came from the Fastly Image Optimizer service over time.
- Origin Latency: a histogram displaying the average amount of time to first byte (measured in milliseconds) on a cache miss or pass. High origin latency means that your backends are taking longer to process requests.
One minute after real-time measurement data in these graphs rolls off the screen, it becomes available for retrieval on the historic stats page. You may not see any traffic right away because of the following:
- Not enough data is going to your site. If this is the case, visit the site yourself to trigger some traffic.
- You've made a CNAME change. If this is the case, it could take from a few minutes to hours for the change to propagate your DNS servers. See how to edit your DNS record to point to Fastly for more information.
Once you start seeing real-time cache activity, you also can interact with your stats graphs.
Viewing the Historic stats
The Historic stats page provides a visual interface to our Stats API for a selected Fastly service. The graphs display metrics derived from your site's statistical information. If you've just created your service, you might see a message saying there's nothing to see yet.
The displayed caching and performance metrics help you optimize your website's speed. These metrics include the following:
- Hit Ratio metrics tell you how well you are caching content using Fastly. This metric represents the proportion of cache hits versus all cacheable content (hits + misses). Increasing your hit ratio improves the overall performance benefit of using Fastly.
- Cache Coverage metrics show how much of your site you are caching with Fastly. This metric represents the ratio of cacheable requests (i.e., non "pass" requests) to total requests. Improving your cache coverage by reducing passes can improve site performance and reduce load on your origin servers.
- Caching Overview metrics compare Cache Hits, Cache Misses, Synthetic Responses (in VCL edge responses), and Passes (or requests that cannot be cached according to your configuration).
The traffic metrics analyze your website's traffic as it evolves over time. These metrics include the following:
- Requests metrics show you the total number of requests over time that were received for your site by Fastly.
- Bytes Transferred metrics show you the total number of bytes transferred by Fastly for your service.
- Header & Body Bytes Transferred metrics show you the relative values of bytes transferred when serving the body portion of HTTP requests and the header portion of the requests.
- Miss Latency metrics show the distribution of only the miss latency times for your origin.
- Error Ratio metrics show you the ratio of error responses (4xx and 5XX status code errors) compared to the total number of requests for your site. This metric allows you to filter types of error responses and quickly identify error spikes at given times.
- HTTP Info, Success, & Redirects metrics shows the number of HTTP Info (1XX), Success (2XX), and Redirect (3XX) statuses served for your site using Fastly.
- Status 3XX Details metrics shows the breakdown between the number of HTTP Status 301s, 302s, 304s, and other 3XX requests.
- HTTP Client and Server Errors metrics shows the number of HTTP Client Errors (4XX), and Server Errors (5XX) served for your site by Fastly.
- When enabled, Image Optimization Requests metrics show you the number of responses that came from the Fastly Image Optimization service.
Once you start to see your caching and performance metrics, you also can interact with your stats graphs.
Working with stats graphs
You can interact with and control your Real-time and Historic stats graphs as follows.
Viewing the real-time stats timestamp indicator
Hovering the cursor over any part of a graph displays a timestamp indicator that updates itself as you move the mouse.
Hiding and displaying the average link
The average line appears as a dashed line on some graphs. To hide the average line for a graph, deselect the Avg checkbox.
Expanding and minimizing graph views
You can expand and minimize the view of some of the graphs using the quadruple arrow button in the right-hand corner of the graph to display an expanded view of the graph or special features it offers. Specifically:
- the Global POP Traffic heat map displays a larger view of the graph as well as the traffic in each POP region, with continuously updating data on the POP's current requests per second, the request error ratio, and the bandwidth going through that POP.
- the Requests, Errors, and Hit Ratio graphs expand to larger versions of themselves along with the already expanded versions of the Bandwidth and Origin Latency graphs.
- the Origin Latency graph specifically includes a small gear icon in the upper right corner that allows you to change the interval limit displayed by the graph from the default 15 second interval to a shorter time frame.
Disabling smooth scrolling
The Real-time graphs update continuously. Leaving the graphs open for long periods of time, however, can occasionally lead to higher CPU utilization. To improve performance, you can deselect the Smooth scrolling checkbox. The graphing animations may not be as smooth when this checkbox is deselected.
Viewing service version activation
Service version activations appear as vertical lines on the Historic graphs. Hovering your cursor over any line displays the version's number and its activation timestamp.
IMPORTANT: You cannot retrieve minutely historical statistics data older than 90 days from the current date. Contact support@fastly.com to discuss your minutely data needs.
Controlling the historic stats date displayed
You can control how you view the historic stats date ranges.
For all displayed graphs, you can choose:
- the exact local date and time range of the graphed data
- how often to sample the data displayed
- whether to view global data for the graphs or only data from a specific region
- how to display the statistical values
Changing the stats displayed in a graph
You can change the statistics displayed in each graph. For example, notice the Average button on this Requests graph:
Clicking this button on any graph (including those on the Real-time stats page) lets you change the display of the graph's data to an average, a 95th percentile, a minimum, a maximum, or a total. When set to average, the graph displays the average as a dashed line.
You can also exclude certain data entirely. For example, in this Caching Overview graph, hovering the cursor over the word "Hits" next to any of the data values displays a small, clickable hide link. Clicking this link will hide that value in the graph's display.
Notice that the actual numbers of the hidden data still appear grayed out in the controls, but the hide link changes to a show link and the graph itself doesn't display the hidden data at all.
About the Configure page
The Configure page allows you to define exactly how each instance of your cache should behave and deliver content from data sources. The Configure page appears automatically for logged in users with the appropriate access permissions.
You use the Configure page to create versions of each of your service's configuration settings and then use the controls to activate or deactivate them.
Specifically, you can configure and manage:
- the domains used to route requests to a service
- the hosts used as backends for a site and how they should be accessed
- the health checks that monitor backend hosts
- various request and cache settings, headers, and responses that control how Fastly caches and serves content for a service
- how logging should be performed and where server logs should be sent (as specified by an rsyslog endpoint)
- custom Varnish configuration language (VCL) files
- how conditions are mapped and used for a service at various times (e.g., during request processing, when Fastly receives a backend response, or just before an object is potentially cached)
With the appropriate permissions, you can activate configuration changes immediately and roll back those changes just as quickly should they not have the intended effect. The Configure page also allows you to compare differences between two configuration versions.
About the user menu
The user menu appears at the far right of the default control group:
Depending on your access permissions, it provides access to a variety of account-specific and personal settings information. Specifically, it gives you access to Account details, Billing information and access to Support. It also provides a way for you log out of the web interface.
About the Account controls
Selecting Account from the user menu displays account-related details for your login with specifics about your Company Profile which include:
- Company settings where you'll find details about your company (e.g., its name and the phone number, the IP allowlist) as well as the location to cancel your account
- User management controls where you can control user invitations and configure their roles
- Account API tokens created by users within your account to control or restrict access to various services
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) lets you add and manage your domains on one of Fastly's shared TLS certificates
- Single Sign On lets you manage user authentication by enabling single sign-on (SSO)
- Billing controls where you can review the charges to your account, change your credit card information, and update your company's tax address
You'll also find Personal Profile information here. Specifically:
- Your profile including your name and your email address
- Change password controls that allow you to update your current login password
- Two-factor authentication information where you can manage the multi-factor authentication controls for your personal login
- Personal API tokens where you can create and delete your personal API tokens you need to control access to various services and resources within your Fastly account
About the Billing controls
Selecting Billing from the user menu displays billing-related account details for your login, including:
- Invoice history with a complete history of the monthly bills for your Fastly account and their payment statuses
- Upgrade account where you can view your current account type and upgrade it to a paid account if you're currently using a free developer trial
- Credit card where you can view and edit your credit card information
- Tax address where you can update your tax or billing address for your account