Content delivery networks (CDNs) reliably and quickly deliver content by caching resources at the edge. CDNs do all that work for you so that you don’t have to worry about it, so it might be tempting not to collect log data from your CDNs. After all, CDNs generate a lot of log data, and you probably have plenty of other things to worry about.
However, it’s a big mistake to neglect CDN logs. That’s because these logs can offer critical insights into how your customers are using your applications. It’s real user monitoring (RUM) 2.0, with a comprehensive view into how users are interacting with your digital assets.
CDN Monitoring Is RUM 2.0
There are plenty of reasons to monitor your CDN data beyond RUM. We’ve written about use cases like CDN observability and CDN switching elsewhere. For example, if you’re having an issue with your website, you can use CDN data to help determine which assets are causing issues and then pinpoint the root cause of the problem. These are extremely valuable use cases, but this post will focus on an emergent use case that many of our users have discovered.
CDN monitoring can provide comprehensive data on how end users are interacting with your digital assets. And this data is crucial not just for operations teams but also marketing, advertising, and business intelligence use cases.
Two attributes in particular can provide granular information about user interaction:
- Request path: The request path is the URL path to a specific asset. For instance, a retail company might have request paths to the following images: /stylish_coat_1, /stylish-coat_2, and /stylish_coat_3. Meanwhile, a media company would be more focused on video assets, but the same principle applies.
- IP address: The IP address provides information about specific users. While some users may use tools like virtual private networks (VPNs) to obscure their IP address, most users do not. At a high level, the IP address provides geographic data about the location of the request. This on its own is extremely valuable information that can allow you to segment customers and end users by geo. Depending on whether your teams are using other tools to build psychographic profiles and targeted campaigns for end users, this data can be especially helpful. And finally, IP addresses can be used to determine the number of unique visitors by geo.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can use request paths and IP addresses to understand your users.
Drilling Down Into CDN Data: A Retail Use Case
Let’s return to the example of request paths for three different stylish coats. Let’s say your marketing and advertising teams wanted to have a better understanding of which resources were most popular by region.
With an aggregate query that determines percentages for each request path and sum of total unique sessions, each grouped by geos, you could get an exact breakdown of the popularity of each resource. Geos can be calculated either using IP address geolocation or you can even use another CDN log attribute like edge location to see which edge location processed the request.
The following graphic provides a simple visualization of what this might look like using a tool like Grafana.
With this map view, you can drill down into each geo and determine which assets were most requested during a specific time frame. With this data, you could answer the following kinds of questions:
- Which assets are most popular? And does this correlate with the actual sales of each item? This might help you determine inventory and future ads for each coat.
- Are there variations in the popularity of each asset based on time of day, week, or season? You might want to drill down into why an asset is especially popular between 6PM and midnight in Japan. Even if you can’t figure out the answer, you can still use that information to better target your marketing and advertising campaigns.
- When are your customers actually starting to shop for the next season? With long-range historical data, you could better pinpoint trends in seasonality for running campaigns.
These are just a few of the questions you could answer just from CDN data. And if all your content is being served through CDNs, you can drill down into a single user’s entire journey on your site by seeing all the request paths from a single user session.
This example just scratches the surface of what you can learn from CDN logs. However, you need a platform that can effectively ingest, store, and query all those logs without breaking the bank.
CDN Monitoring and RUM 2.0
With Hydrolix for AWS, an origin-to-edge observability solution, you get cost-effective real-time and historical analytics of all your CDN data. Hydrolix is a real-time data platform that also powers TrafficPeak, an observability solution running on Akamai Connected Cloud.
CDN data is multi-faceted and high-intensity (many enterprises generate terabytes of CDN data every day), so you need a solution that has solved for the biggest challenges of collecting, ingesting, and analyzing that data. With Hydrolix for AWS, you get all of the following benefits:
- Real-time analytics of all your CDN data for operations teams.
- The ability to stream all your CDN logs into a single table. This makes it easy for your teams to compare data across multiple CDNs.
- Cost-effective historical analytics and fifteen months of always “hot” data retention by default. By having access to all your CDN data, you can analyze long-term trends, including factors like seasonality, and generate new insights from your data.
- The ability to aggregate your CDN data into summary tables in real time for queries that involve sums, percentages, and more. Summary tables provide cost-effective, high-performance queries for a wide range of use cases. All while allowing you to keep the underlying raw data so you can drill down whenever you need it.
- Cost-effective, simple pricing that makes it easy to maximize the value of your CDN data without breaking the budget.
Maximizing the Value of CDN Data for All Your Teams
Most enterprises aren’t collecting their CDN data, let alone maximizing its value. The challenge lies in how much data CDNs can generate, and how costly ingesting, analyzing, and retaining that data can be. Most platforms can’t handle the load. Even if they can, keeping that data is so expensive that it’s not possible to get the most out of your CDN data.
Hydrolix changes the economics of log data, making it affordable for enterprises to monitor and analyze their CDNs. Here are just some of the teams that can benefit from using Hydrolix for AWS for multi-CDN monitoring:
- Operations teams get complete observability into content delivery to quickly find and fix issues before they impact end users.
- Marketing and advertising teams get valuable data that they can use to better segment and target potential customers.
- BI and data science teams can use the data to answer important business questions around capacity planning and inventory.
- Leadership teams have more data available for making data-driven decisions—all while benefiting from a platform that’s more cost-effective than competing solutions.
Get Started with Hydrolix for AWS
- You can start ingesting data and getting insights from Hydrolix for AWS in under twenty minutes. Follow along with the Getting started in our docs and sign up for a 7-day free trial.
- Learn more about CDN Insights, a pre-bundled solution that allows you to monitor and correlate data across all your CDNs—no custom configuration required.
