DAZN is a global sports streaming service in 200 markets around the world, and in the summer of 2025, they hosted and broadcasted 63 matches of the FIFA Club World Cup in 30 days. Streaming rights for the event covered a global audience, and DAZN offered the standard tier for free to viewers. For Aniello Veneruso, Distribution Engineering Manager at DAZN, that meant navigating the complexities of streaming delivery in markets around the world and providing a flawless experience for viewers using tens of millions of unique client devices.
At the 2025 IBC Convention in Amsterdam, Veneruso discussed the challenges of monitoring CDN traffic and finding issues in complex distributed systems with Rory McVicar, Senior Partner Manager at Hydrolix. As the discussion uncovers, DAZN used multi-CDN observability from Hydrolix to solve a wide range of issues for the FIFA Club World Cup. Hydrolix allowed DAZN to move from high-level dashboard to details in the underlying raw logs in a single pane of glass, giving them visibility into issues that would’ve been impossible to uncover otherwise.
Watch the IBC session Multi-CDN Observability for the FIFA Club World Cup with Rory McVicar, Sr. Partner Manager, Hydrolix, and Aniello Veneruso, Distribution Engineering Manager, DAZN. This post covers the highlights of the session.
As Veneruso put it, “The internet is a tough place to navigate, and you need someone that can help you to select the best route through the internet.” With Hydrolix, DAZN discovered and fixed issues that were impacting end users and causing silent revenue loss. That included:
- Seemingly random behavior in some CDN points of presence (PoPs) that only occurred with specific internet service providers (ISPs), leading to performance issues for some users.
- Latency in ad origin servers and ad segment blocking, which led to obscured revenue potential until the issues were uncovered and fixed.
- Inconsistencies in geolocation and allow lists that blocked legitimate networks and requesters from accessing content.
Monitoring CDN Traffic for Massive Live Events
For DAZN, the challenges of delivering a great FIFA Club World Cup viewing experience for millions of viewers around the world was immense. “We were ready to deliver global traffic, but not at this scale,” Veneruso said. “And the idea was, okay, we need to have massive capacity in every country to serve traffic for the best performance. So we need to onboard not one, not two, not three, like five, extra CDN worldwide.” Each CDN uses different technologies to deliver content, and then there are variations in ISPs, networks, PoPs, and CDN autonomous systems.
“Usually we have this approach where we check the internet and the ISPs,” Veneruso said. “But obviously doing it worldwide, for all the ISPs in the world, was impossible… We had our technologies to monitor the CDN, but doing an integration of that level with different CDNs and different technology was basically impossible with our technology at the time. So this is why we searched for a partner, and that was when we met Hydrolix.”
The event highlights for DAZN included:
- 63 matches in 30 days with 200 markets to serve
- Over 12 billion viewing minutes delivered
- Delivering content to tens of millions of unique client devices
During the event, Hydrolix:
- Ingested hundreds of billions of records, with peak ingest of more than one million rows per second.
- Made incoming data available for analysis within seconds on average, with almost a million queries from DAZN users over the course of the entire event.
- Ingested hundreds of terabytes of raw log data over the entire event.
- Compressed stored logs by 93%, allowing for cost-effective long-term storage.
Improving Ad Delivery to Unlock More Revenue
Ads are a major source of revenue during streaming events, but only if they are properly delivered to end users. However, many things can go wrong with ad delivery, ranging from issues with ad servers to ads being blocked due to mismatched security settings. The primary concern of viewers is watching the big game, not ad delivery, so issues with ad delivery can easily end up being mostly invisible, leading to missed revenue potential. According to Aniello, “It is the type of issue that is really important, but it’s really hard to find, because you don’t have the customer complaining about it.”
Hydrolix helped DAZN uncover three separate issues with ad delivery. “We were able to separate the ads traffic from the video traffic thanks to Hydrolix. We had a specific dashboard just focused on ads, something that we never had at that level [before],” Aniello said. Typically, when there are issues with latency or delivery, it’s assumed to be a CDN issue. “[It’s natural to assume], ‘oh, it’s a CDN problem’… But thanks to [the dashboard], we’re able to understand, okay, no, this is not a CDN issue. This is just a problem of a specific ad origin, not even all the ad origins.” Specifically, there was an issue with increased latency for ad playback during periods of high concurrency. The dashboard focused on ad performance helped the team identify the root cause as a scaling bottleneck in the origin serving ads, which was owned by a separate team. With the raw logs as evidence, the team was able to raise the issue with the vendor and get it fixed.
By analyzing the raw CDN logs, the distribution team at DAZN also uncovered an access control issue with ad delivery. A CDN used as a mid-tier cache was incorrectly applying IP blocking to downstream CDNs. By inspecting request headers, the distribution team was able to identify the error and contact the CDN provider for a quick configuration fix. Adding the IPs to an allowlist unlocked additional ad revenue.
Solving Intermittent Issues: A Challenge at Scale
CDNs can easily generate terabytes of logs daily, and when it comes to large events and monitoring multiple CDNs, most observability and logging platforms have challenges with such high volumes of data, and it’s extremely costly to retain that data. As a result, it’s typical for enterprises to aggregate CDN logs (or discard them altogether). Hydrolix makes it possible to ingest and analyze huge volumes of CDN logs in real time, finding issues that would’ve been challenging or even impossible to uncover otherwise.
One such concern for DAZN involved an intermittent issue with PoPs in one of the CDNs they were working with. The errors seemed random, but when they drilled down into the raw logs, they realized that the bug was only happening with a specific ISP, and that the issue was related to a specific PoP class configuration error. “So that was interesting because it meant that it was something in the embedded PoP of that CDN, a really strange corner case,” Aniello said. “And when we opened this case to the CDN, they were impressed, obviously, that we found this.” According to Aniello, this kind of issue is “absolutely impossible to find with [just] client side telemetry” that’s typical with many quality-of-experience monitoring tools. “It’s impossible without Hydrolix to find and fix this.”
The distribution team uncovered another issue when they filtered the raw data to analyze blocked requests by country. By looking at blocked requests, teams can get more information about issues like CDN leaching, stream piracy, and other malicious behavior. But sometimes legitimate requests are blocked, and in this case, mismatches in geolocation information in different systems were impacting the end user experience. “So we found this issue that, once again, is super niche,” Aniello said. “We … suspected something like this, but we were never able to investigate this at this scale.” With typical client telemetry, this is “impossible to see because we are talking about a small amount of users, usually specific subnets, specific countries, specific niche issues.” With Hydrolix, DAZN was able to ensure a flawless experience for more viewers. “It was really useful to have a system that allowed us to see everything in one place.” That included CDN metrics, information on ad delivery, and security and access control.
Delivering a Flawless Viewering Experience at Scale
Due to their tremendous volume, CDN logs have traditionally been aggregated or discarded, making it difficult or even impossible to resolve issues that directly impact end users and the bottom line. Issues that seem intermittent add up quickly, leading to poor quality of experience and silent revenue loss. An issue impacting a small percentage of users can have a large impact when hundreds of thousands or millions of viewers are streaming an event. And as Aniello points out, the internet is a tough place to navigate. This is especially true when that navigation involves markets and networks all around the world, and multiple CDNs that each have their own systems, rules, and ways of operating.
As McVicar puts it, “Moving from a broadcast model to a streaming model, you increase the number of things that you need to monitor effectively, but your viewers still have exactly the same expectations. They want a flawless stream every single time. And also your business has an expectation around how you ensure that content is secure, not accessed by the wrong people, how you ensure that the monetization strategies that you’re applying to your content are optimized and the ads are delivered just as well as the as the main content, and also that there is no lag or delay in any part of the experience.”
That’s a big challenge for distribution and operation teams, and it requires a log analytics platform that can handle the massive load of CDN log data and provide domain-specific knowledge on CDN monitoring and streaming delivery. Hydrolix can help uncover and mitigate issues with streams and ad delivery that enterprises couldn’t even detect before, making the internet an easier place to navigate.
Next Steps
- Interested in more success stories? Check out customer stories.
- Book a demo or managed trial to get started with Hydrolix.
