The level of Internet activity in the UAE follows a clear and regular pattern over the course of a week.
From Sunday to Thursday, it climbs rapidly each morning and plateaus for several hours before dropping and levelling out again, this time for a shorter period. Activity then drops further, reaching its lowest ebb during the night before the daily cycle starts again.
During the weekend, peaks of activity during the day are lower, and there is just a single plateau, which lasts longer.
Information such as this is available on the Oracle Internet Intelligence Map, a tool for businesses to monitor volatility in Internet traffic.
Launched in June and powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, this web portal allows users to assess levels of Internet traffic globally and determine if outside factors might be causing disruption to their own operations. They can also assess activity in particular countries, including the Emirates.
“We have a measurement agent hosted in a cloud provider in the UAE,” said David Belson, a senior director of Internet research and analysis at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The map shows, for example, country-level security threats that could impact internet performance, along with connectivity statistics and transit shifts.
“We have historically kept it close to our chest over the last few years. It’s an opportunity for us to share and to be more open and to give back to the Internet community,” said Belson.
Belson said the map could be used, for example, to assess the impact that a particular event, such as the arrival of extreme weather, was having in a given area.
“If you are a site or web application owner and you’re getting complaints, you live in the UAE, you’re getting trouble getting on your application, you could look at this and see there’s significant disruption. You could be assured it’s not your application. It’s a high-level troubleshooting tool,” said Belson.
The tool, which works with Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, could also help companies cut the amount of Internet downtime that they suffer.
Global maps show hotspots of potential disruptions and indicate traffic shifts in the previous 48 hours.
Myriad factors might cause country-level alterations in the level of internet traffic. While extreme weather events can disrupt traffic, the run-up to them might lead to an increase in activity as citizens seek information about what is about to happen.
Oracle’s Internet Intelligence division, known as Dyn Research before its acquisition by Oracle, has been constantly monitoring the Internet for more than a decade and that data has been recorded.
The tool can be accessed at internetintel.oracle.com/index.html.