Application Traffic

Application traffic is a key component to understanding how much usage or demand a digital asset such as an application receives. Estimating traffic is often a combination of art and science due to a lack of ground-truth traffic data, which only the application owner and the infrastructure providers they rely on have access to.

How does Intricately capture traffic?

We combine first-party traffic measurement data collected from our sensor network with data from 3rd party data partners to generate a comprehensive view of global application traffic for every company.

What is Application Traffic?

Traffic is an absolute measure of application demand and is designed to represent the enormous (and growing) scale of the internet.

Traffic is measured at the application level. We then report traffic across the following categories:

• Company – Traffic at the company level represents the digital demand for a company’s applications. All the domains, websites, and mobile applications operated by a company are included in this value.

• Product Deployment – Traffic at the Product Deployment level represents digital demand supported by one of the company’s Products.

• Product Category – Traffic at the Product Category level represents digital demand supported by a Product Category in which the company has one or more Products deployed.

• Point of Presence (PoP) – Traffic at the PoP level represents digital demand for the applications hosted at the PoP. All applications deployed in the Point of Presence are included.

• Product Deployment Point of Presence – Traffic at the Product Deployment Points of Presence level represents the digital demand supported by the Point of Presence.

Intricately Traffic Value (ITV)

Intricately Traffic Value is an absolute scaled measure of requests over time (aka traffic demand) as seen by Intricately.

Intricately Traffic Value (ITV) represents application demand. The real-world traffic metric with the closest proximity to ITV is application requests over time.

It is generated by normalizing our first-party traffic measurements with traffic data we receive from 3rd party data partners.

We normalize the traffic data so that it can be aggregated using our entity maps. This approach allows us to maintain a real-time view of the relative traffic of a company, its product deployments, networks, and data center deployments.

How can I use Application Traffic?

• Sorting and Prioritization – For example, you can sort companies by traffic to understand their relative rates of demand.

• Comparing – For example, if Company A has a traffic value of 10 and Company B has a traffic value of 100, Company B has 10 times the demand of Company A.

Traffic Coverage

Our network monitors global application traffic and can report on total demand and provide detail at the individual product deployment level. This enables you to assess how much demand a company has from a specific country and further segment usage by a given provider (i.e AWS vs Azure).

Because our system monitors the physical data center(s) an application is hosted in, we can model the latency experience for users from multiple locations around the world.

It's common to see the following ITV Traffic Values at the product deployment level:

Especially in the case of infrastructure products, there are many products responsible for delivering the same application traffic.

For example, to deliver an image or a video: that piece of content could first be delivered from Amazon S3 storage, then through an application server running on Amazon EC2, then through Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing product, and then finally through Amazon's CloudFront CDN product. All these products are delivering the same piece of content (the same application traffic).