When tens of millions of viewers hit play on the Super Bowl LIX stream, the stakes were as high as Taylor Swift’s short shorts. For FOX, even a one-second delay or an error in log data visibility could disrupt the Super Bowl 2025 experience. And if most viewers are anything like my dad, they’re already screaming profanities before the 7-layer dip is breached. (This is an audience with very little patience.) Fortunately, behind the scenes Hydrolix was there to help ensure flawless performance through a breakthrough approach to real-time monitoring of multiple CDNs.
In a DZone webinar held last month, Hydrolix VP of Engineering Catherine Johnson and Solutions Engineer Coralie Seuzaret shared how Hydrolix ingested over 200 terabytes of log data over Super Bowl LIX, and how we turned it into instant wins for FOX performance, security, and operations teams.
The Hidden Cost of Log Silos
To kick off the webinar, Johnson explained that most enterprises face the same root problem: fragmented log data.
“When logs live across CDNs, cloud platforms, and monitoring tools, you lose the ability to act fast,” she said. “If your teams can’t correlate logs in real-time, you can’t find the root cause before customers feel the pain.”
For media and entertainment companies, that’s mission-critical. Different CDNs produce logs with different formats, field names, and timestamps. Aggregating them into one coherent view is nearly impossible with traditional log management tools. The result: teams manually exporting data, building ad-hoc dashboards, and reacting too late.
When Security and CDN Logs Don’t Align
Seuzaret pointed out another issue: cross-team visibility.
“Security and CDN teams often work in silos, looking at different pieces of the same puzzle,” she explained. “Visibility across both is the only way to truly understand what’s happening.”
Security teams analyze WAF and firewall logs. CDN teams analyze delivery logs. But they rarely connect the dots, she said. A WAF rule might block legitimate traffic, and no one realizes until viewers drop off.
Hydrolix unifies logs (security, CDN, and other logs) into one searchable dataset. Teams can instantly query end-to-end data flows, identify anomalies, and understand how configuration changes affect user experience. It’s not just log aggregation; it’s true log analytics. It’s fast, contextual, and complete.
The Super Bowl: 55 Billion Log Lines in Real Time
During Super Bowl LIX, the system ingested more than 17 gigabytes per second at peak, representing 55 billion individual log lines, all queryable within seconds.
The architecture of Hydrolix combines multi-region ingestion, the ability to standardize data from many sources in a single table, and massively parallel query execution. The result: instant visibility across every CDN, edge location, and region, even under extreme load.
Johnson and Seuzaret also outlined stories from Hydrolix’s contributions to other huge sporting events like the FIFA Club Championship, the world’s largest cricket tournaments, and more.
Global Log Analytics in Action: DAZN’s FIFA World Cup Coverage
Hydrolix applied the same principles to DAZN’s FIFA Club World Cup streams, enabling tokenization and access control logs across multiple CDNs.
This visibility didn’t just prevent unauthorized access, it helped DAZN identify and fix performance bottlenecks on the fly. During one match, engineers traced ad playback latency to a specific ad origin, verified the finding in the logs, and resolved it immediately.
From Log Analytics to AI Insights
As organizations retain more complete data, they’re finding new uses for it in AI and LLM applications.
“AI models are only as good as the logs you feed them,” said Johnson. “Hydrolix makes it possible to train models on full datasets, not samples.”
The platform integrates directly with tools like Databricks and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing LLMs to query Hydrolix data in natural language. As Seuzaret demos, users can simply ask: Show me unusual error rates by CDN in the last five minutes. And Hydrolix runs the SQL under the hood and returns immediate results.
Making Massive Log Analytics Effortless
Whether it’s the Super Bowl, the FIFA Club World Cup, or your next product launch, Hydrolix gives teams the confidence that every log, metric, and event is accessible in real time.
In an industry where milliseconds matter, Hydrolix’s real-time log analytics platform ensures you always see the full picture, so your systems, your teams, and your customers never miss a beat. Or a touchdown, or a kick, or a product drop.
Next Steps
- Check out the DZone webinar.
- Interested in seeing Hydrolix for yourself? Book a demo.
