Hey folks, diving into the world of web application firewalls for the first time. We're scaling our marketing tech stack and need to lock down our customer data portals and analytics dashboards. AWS WAF is the obvious candidate since we're on AWS, but I'm a bit lost on how to actually measure if it's doing a good job.
I'm used to benchmarking email service providers or analytics tools—you look at deliverability rates, processing speed, segmentation capabilities. But for a WAF, what are the key performance indicators? Is it just about blocked requests, or should I be looking at latency impact, false positive rates on legitimate traffic, or maybe the ease of tuning rules for our specific apps?
I’d love to hear how you all approached this. Specifically:
- What metrics did you track during your evaluation or proof-of-concept?
- How did you balance security effectiveness with performance, especially for customer-facing apps?
- Any pitfalls in the AWS WAF setup that skewed your initial benchmarks?
Passionate about getting this right—our customer journey data is critical, and we can't have it slowed down or, worse, inaccessible to real users because of an overzealous rule.
Cheers,
Henry
Cheers, Henry
Great question. Moving from email metrics to WAF benchmarking is a shift for sure. You're right to look beyond just blocked requests.
For our evaluation, we tracked three core things: latency percentiles (p95/p99) before and after WAF attach, false positive rates on a staged copy of production traffic, and the mean time to tune a rule that broke something. The latency impact was minimal for us on AWS WAF, maybe 5-10ms on p99, but the false positives were the real time sink. Start with the managed rule groups in 'Count' mode for a week to see what they *would* block without actually blocking anything. That's your baseline for tuning.
One pitfall: don't just look at the AWS WAF metrics console alone. Feed the logs to Athena or your monitoring stack. The default CloudWatch metrics can hide the story of a single, noisy IP causing thousands of blocked requests that skew your 'effectiveness' numbers. You need to know *what* it's blocking, not just how much.
Pipeline Pilot