About Bot Management
Fastly's Bot Management product allows you to identify bots and decrease unwanted bot activity from Fastly's network edge.
Fastly's Bot Management product allows you to identify bots and decrease unwanted bot activity. You can use Bot Management at Fastly's network edge to implement:
- Advanced client-side detections to detect bots that leverage headless browsers such as headless Chrome.
- Client challenges to require users to prove that they are human or that a connection is happening through a legitimate browser.
- Client fingerprinting to identify client types and detect bots designed for malicious activities.
- Private Access Tokens to protect access resources on your origin.
To start using these features, you must enable Bot Management on the relevant services.
Prerequisites
Before enabling Bot Management for you services, you must:
- purchase Bot Management and the Next-Gen WAF for deployment on Fastly's Edge Cloud platform at either the Professional or Premier platform level (it is not available for the Essential platform) or as part of the Security Core, Security Core Plus, or Security Total packaged offering. This requires a paid account with a contract for Fastly's services.
- review the Bot Management limitations.
Enabling Bot Management on services
Once you've obtained access to Bot Management features, you can enable Bot Management for services using the Fastly control panel or API.
- Control panel
- API
To enable Bot Management on a service using the Fastly control panel, follow these steps:
- Log in to the Fastly control panel.
- From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.
Click Service configuration.
In the Security area, click the Bot Management switch to On to immediately enable Bot Management for this service.
You can then optionally configure client challenges and advanced client-side detections for those services. Note that client fingerprinting and Private Access Tokens require no additional setup.
