Hoey Design & Solutions was contracted by Akamai Technologies to develop a sophisticated web-based user interface for a custom network performance monitoring tool. Akamai's large government client wanted a "god's eye view" of the public Internet: the traffic bottlenecks, the ongoing virus attacks, and other data vital to understanding the global "health" of the Internet.

We were given a mandate to create an intuitive, compelling user interface that included graphical displays of quantitative data along with geospatial representations of related information. Building on a combination of high-quality open-source and commercial software, Hoey Design & Solutions developed a complete, interactive user interface that includes a world map (powered by Modest Maps) showing global network "alert" conditions. The mapping code was extensively customized to support the required features, which include the ability to place alert markers, the ability to hover over and click on alerts to "drill down" to learn more detail, and the ability to constrain the map's panning and zooming features. The UI also includes customized charts showing high-level aggregate statistics, which can also be explored in more depth to break out details.

Akamai's distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery includes more than 18,000 servers worldwide, making Akamai uniquely qualified to deliver this kind of high-quality data. Hoey Design & Solutions' ability to create complex ActionScript code and implement a clean, sophisticated, data-driven UI helped Akamai to deliver a compelling project to its customer, securing interest in further contracts with this client.