Queue Your Visitors During High Demand

Visitor Prioritization and mPulse Front and Center in the Fight Against COVID-19

The creation of a vaccine to fight the COVID-19 virus has provided hope that there may soon be an end to the most impactful public health crisis of the century.  With infection rates soaring around the world and death rates at an alltime high, the promise of a vaccine is welcomed news.

Newly elected US President Joe Biden has put forth an initiative to vaccinate 100 million people within the first 100 days of his administration, creating a huge logistical challenge made even more difficult as implementation of the vaccine rollout is left to each state to manage independently.

One southern state chose to partner with a supermarket chain in January to distribute vaccines to its citizens.  The first group of residents eligible to receive the vaccine are those 65 and older, health care workers, and those who live or work in long-term care facilities.  In a state with 4.5 million people 65 and older, the demand for vaccinations is very high.

State officials decided to offer vaccines by appointment only.  Appointments could only be made online.  No phone or in-person registrations are allowed.  The grocer, an Akamai customer since 2015, turned to Akamai again to quickly stand up the infrastructure to manage the unprecedented influx of online registration traffic.

The grocer decided to implement the Visitor Prioritization Cloudlet (VPC) as a means of managing the requests for the limited number of vaccine appointments available each week.  VPC places customers in a virtual waiting room, which allows the store to 

  • Monitor the number of appointment requests coming into the system
  • Control the amount of traffic going to their origin so as not to overload it
  • Assign appointments to applicants based on the amount of vaccine available

How It Works

The first implementation of VPC looked something like this:

  1. User visits store.com and clicks on the covid vaccine page
  2. User enters the VPC waiting room
    1. User is informed to wait on this page until an appointment booking slot becomes available
      1. only 10% of its users are allowed to access the origin to start the booking process.  All others are placed on hold in the waiting room.
    2. Page automatically refreshes every 60 seconds to check for an available booking slot.
  3. Once a booking slot becomes available, the Book Now button is enabled
  4. User is prompted to select an appointment location and time slot.
  5. A confirmation message is displayed

The grocer opened its site for vaccine appointments at 6am on January 7, 2021 with 15,000 doses available.  All 15,000 vaccine appointments were booked by 6:05am – within 5 minutes.  Additional appointments were made available over the next several weeks, including January 22nd, where 45,000 appointments were made available.  All appointments were booked within 2 hours and managed by the VPC waiting room process.

Room For Improvement

This initial rollout of VPC for the customer was certainly viewed as a success.  That doesn’t mean, however, that there wasn’t room for improvement.  The first area of improvement was around real time visibility into the size of the waiting room.

The grocer used their existing Google Analytics (GA) tool to monitor the activity of their users based on page name.  They soon discovered, however, that GA didn’t give them the insight they were looking for because:

  • The data wasn’t real time
  • They had no ability to categorize/filter the data based on the VPC settings
  • They exceeded the number of page requests per day that GA allows, even though they were paying for the highest tier

This is where mPulse came into the picture.  We were able to quickly configure mPulse to capture all the page groups on the site and create an integration with VPC that allowed mPulse to recognize waiting room pages vs. allowed pages.  

We also created a few custom dashboards to visualize it all.  This was all done within a few hours.

Armed with this realtime data, the grocer now had the visibility to make on-the-fly decisions about the amount of traffic they allowed to origin within the VPC settings.  The typical mPulse use case is around performance monitoring and optimization.  However, VPC presents a use case for real time visibility into traffic of a flash event.

Further Enhancements

The grocer obtained authorization from several additional states to extend vaccine services to its senior citizens as well.  This meant creating additional waiting rooms for each state and monitoring waiting rooms by state within mPulse.

Technical success notwithstanding, there has been lots of media coverage about the public’s dissatisfaction with the online appointment process.  Much of this frustration is inevitable given the large demand for a limited supply of vaccines.  Another point of frustration was with the booking selection process.  A user that had been in the waiting room for 5 minutes was just as likely to be selected to move to the booking process as a user that had been in the waiting room for 2 hours.  To solve this issue, the grocer created a cookie to keep track of how long the user had been in the waiting room and gave priority to those waiting the longest.  The mPulse config was updated to read this time-based cookie in addition to the waiting room cookies.

This dashboard was created to show

  • Traffic levels of the 3 stages for the registration process
    • The generic (front) waiting room
    • The state (back) waiting room
    • Users allowed to the booking page
  • Within each waiting room, the time the users have been waiting – grouped into 1 of 14 time groups

Conclusion

Since the grocer administered its first vaccines on Jan. 7, it has given more than 100,000 doses, all managed using VPC and mPulse.  mPulse provides the real time visibility into the size of each waiting room and how long users have been in the waiting room.  The grocer uses this information to make real time decisions about the amount of booking traffic to allow to the origin.  In a recent enrollment period, VPC and mPulse managed requests for more than 300,000 users and over 100 million pages per hour.

VPC presents a compelling use case for mPulse – the ability to monitor traffic of flash events in real time, with customized views of the waiting rooms.  mPulse should be positioned with every VPC opportunity.  It’s the only way to receive real time information on a flash event that’s managed by the VPC.