Monitor Your Video Infrastructure With Hydrolix and Mux Data

Poor video performance, outages, and pirated streams can cause significant issues for on-demand streaming. These issues can be catastrophic for live events where demand is high and viewers don’t want to miss a single second.

That’s why you need real-time analytics to quickly identify and mitigate issues, which can be challenging when a major event is generating millions of log lines per second.

Many observability platforms have challenges ingesting and analyzing data at this scale. Even worse, they are prohibitively expensive, forcing enterprises to choose between high costs, short “hot” data retention windows, or discarding data.

Like all Hydrolix-powered solutions, Hydrolix for AWS is designed for large volumes of log data. It excels at use cases like CDN monitoring, which is essential for broadcasters, streaming video providers, and telcos. One such solution is Akamai’s TrafficPeak, the fastest growing observability solution in the industry. TrafficPeak has provided multi-CDN observability and monitoring for the biggest sporting events and product launches in the world in 2024—including the biggest football game of the year.

Whether these enterprises are delivering a global sporting event or a niche entertainment program, they need a deep understanding of their infrastructure. They must have visibility from the origin to the edge to deliver premium streaming experiences, fix issues quickly, and better understand how their customers are interacting with their content. But how are enterprises supposed to get comprehensive visibility into video players?

The answer: we are partnering with Mux to give you real-time observability into end user video players. With this data, you can get insights like:

• When users are having buffering and playback issues
• When video content is being abandoned
• How users are interacting with your content

Each minute that an issue remains unresolved significantly increases the percentage of viewers impacted. Hydrolix with Mux can help you resolve issues quickly and minimize this impact.

The Mux integration is compatible with Hydrolix for AWS. It’s also compatible with TrafficPeak, an Akamai Cloud observability solution powered by Hydrolix, as well as Hydrolix Enterprise.

Origin-to-Edge Observability With Hydrolix for AWS and Mux

Hydrolix for AWS gives you real-time and historical insights of AWS CloudFront and WAF logs (with more AWS services coming soon), all in one view.

Hydrolix for AWS can store and analyze terabytes of log data every day while giving you cost-effective, long-term storage. You also get sub-second query latency on all your data whether it’s a minute or a year old.

This makes Hydrolix for AWS an ideal fit for origin-to-edge observability and CDN monitoring, which typically generate large volumes of data.

Mux gives you comprehensive, high-dimensionality data on video sessions. With Mux, you can quickly detect potential quality of experience (QoE) issues like playback failures, long video startup time, and rebuffering latency, so you can fix them.

The next image shows a few of the metrics that you can analyze in Hydrolix for AWS with the Mux integration.

You can quickly see the number of people playing a piece of content, the number of users per bitrate, throughput versus bitrate, and buffer starvation. Both low bitrates and buffer starvation lead to lower QoE for end users.

Combined, Hydrolix for AWS and Mux provide unique benefits that other platforms can’t provide, including: 

• Next-level CDN monitoring—now with video analytics included
• Real-time origin-to-edge observability including for major events generating millions of log lines per second
• Long-term historical analytics for a deep understanding of user engagement and trends over time

Let’s take a look at each of these.

Next-Level CDN Monitoring—Now With Video Analytics Included

Hydrolix for AWS and other services powered by Hydrolix already offer CDN monitoring at a level that other observability solutions can’t match.

For major streaming providers, CDN monitoring often involves ingesting terabytes of data every day in real time, then quickly analyzing and acting on that data to optimize CDN performance by geos, ISP providers, and more.

Many platforms can’t handle this level of scale cost-effectively. They often have challenges ingesting and storing data for major real-time events. These are typically the biggest events of the year for streaming providers. Providing a high quality of experience is critical for customer retention, ad delivery, and improving brand perception.

Now, through Hydrolix’s partnership with Mux, you can see exactly where customers are having issues with streaming content and then compare that data against CDN logs. For instance, you might see issues with slow startup time in a specific geo which you can then quickly correlate against CDNs, ISPs, browser agents, and your business logic to find and fix the issue.

Real-Time Analytics at Any Scale to Find and Fix Issues

Hydrolix for AWS can scale up for major events that generate ten million log lines per second or more. Even at this scale, Hydrolix streams real-time data and makes it available for queries within seconds. Yout get real-time analytics whether you’re monitoring the latest movie release or the biggest sporting event of the year. Other observability platforms typically have much higher latency or can time out altogether when dealing with a massive influx of log data.

With the Mux integration, you get even deeper visibility into the edge, including real-time analytics on how streaming content is performing and how users are engaging with it.

Don’t take the chance that your platform will leave you in the dark for your biggest events of the year.

Historical Analytics for Business Intelligence

Imagine if you could easily compare your content today versus one week ago, one month ago, and even one year ago, with the ability to drill down into individual log lines, interesting outliers, and different demographics. You could get a deeper understanding into which video content is performing over time, get valuable insights on ad performance and user engagement, and discover trends that can help you make informed decisions about the future of your business.

This simply isn’t possible with other observability solutions. Instead, enterprises are typically forced to keep costs down by having short data retention windows or throwing data away altogether.

With Hydrolix for AWS, you get 15 months of “hot” data retention by default and cost-effective S3-compatible storage. You can keep all your data much longer without blowing up your budget.

Combined with Mux, you can look at user engagement with your content across months, quarters, and even years. And if you want to slice your data in a new way—such as to better understand how a specific region has engaged with your content over the last year—you’ll have all your data available to do it instead of a pre-aggregated slice that can’t provide new insights.

Get Started With the Mux Integration

The Mux integration is available with:

• Hydrolix for AWS, a managed observability solution for AWS. Hydrolix for AWS is now available in public preview in the Amazon Marketplace. You can set up Hydrolix for AWS in minutes by following along with the Getting Started docs. Get a demo or more info.
• TrafficPeak, an Akamai Cloud observability solution powered by Hydrolix. Learn more about TrafficPeak.
• Hydrolix, a data platform that powers both Hydrolix for AWS and TrafficPeak. To set up the Mux integration with Hydrolix, you need an AWS Kinesis stream. See the documentation on Mux via Kinesis.