Your online application is wildly successful, drawing in more and more business every day, but you are under pressure to improve customer experience. How do you give priority to loyal customers? How can you redirect customers to new services without downtime? Can you improve performance without adding more horsepower? How long does it take to resolve problems with application performance or security? If you application developers are busy, how can you solve problems right now!

Stingray Traffic Manager is an application-centric traffic management and load balancing virtual ADC providing control, intelligence, security and resilience for application traffic.  Stingray Traffic Manager is intended for organizations hosting valuable business-critical TCP and UDP-based services like HTTP (web) and media delivery, XML-based services such as Web Services and many more. Stingray Traffic Manager's architecture ensures it handles large volumes of network traffic efficiently. Its scalability allows dynamically adding front-end traffic managers or back-end servers on demand. The cluster size is unlimited, and the performance of the traffic manager grows in line with the performance of the underlying hardware.

TrafficScript is an adaptable rules engine that can be executed when new connections or network requests are received or when receiving responses from backend servers. The rules inspect the incoming and outgoing data in the connection, and other aspects such as source or destination addresses. Rules can be written to modify the request or response, set session persistence parameters, or decide how to route the request or even rewrite the content of the output page.

Using TrafficScript, it's straightforward and easy to perform any of these traffic management tasks and thousands more:

  • Inspect incoming or outgoing traffic and rewrite it fully or in part as desired
  • Restrict a website to a certain range of IP addresses
  • Apply selective management to elements such as web spiders
  • Enable or disable functions for a given request or response (such as compression)
  • Retry request that generate errors a maximum number of times
  • Future-proof your services against any change in the back-end components of the system
  • Work around broken links and content on your website

Customers have told us they used TrafficScript to do fix and extend their websites:

  • A Global ISP uses TrafficScript to help filter out invalid usernames
    • https://splash.riverbed.com/community/product-lines/stingray/blog/2012/11/29/protecting-websites-from-hack-attacks
    • An online auction house uses TrafficScript for giving priority access to customers http://www.riverbed.com/customer-stories/gilt-groupe.html
    • A managed service provider uses TS it to fix security bugs in third-party applications http://www.riverbed.com/customer-stories/mogul.html

Here are a few of the many examples and code samples on http://splash.riverbed.com

Stingray Spider Catcher applies individual rate shapes to each session, so that no session can submit too high a rate of requests.

Dynamic Rate Shaping uses Service Level Monitoring to detect when performance is beginning to degrade, then applies a rate limit to reduce the amount of traffic to the application.

Detecting and Managing Abusive Referrers discusses the problem of high-traffic referral sites such as Slashdot or Digg and describes how to de-prioritize these users on your site so that other users are not penalized.

Not a developer?  Don't worry; Stingray Traffic Manager has a user friendly feature called RuleBuilder that helps generate TrafficScript. RuleBuilder provides an interface to configure tests, and actions which are executed if one or all tests are satisfied. The tests and actions are predefined, and cover a subset of the full functions of TrafficScript. RuleBuilder can be used similarly to the filtering rules in email clients.

Want to give it a try right now? Download a fully featured free version now and see for yourself.

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