We’ve been thrilled with the Hydrolix product and it’s really helped solve a lot of observability issues for us.”

Head of CDN Operations

This case study covers a real deployment at one of the top-5 gaming platforms in the world. This company operates a digital storefront for a global player base. Their CDN operations team manages content delivery across four providers simultaneously, serving hundreds of millions of players across every continent.

They came to Hydrolix with a specific, urgent operational problem. This is how they solved it.

Many game publishers use multi-CDN infrastructure to optimize content delivery for players. This game publisher runs four CDNs. No single vendor covers every region at the throughput and reliability gaming players demand, so redundancy is critical to protect against delivery infrastructure failures during a launch.

Each CDN provider has its own unique logging format, fields, and dashboards, making it extremely challenging to compare performance and correlate issues. Before Hydrolix, engineers were forced to context-switch between dashboards and to triangulate whether what they were seeing in one system was showing up in another.

That delay has a direct revenue cost.

Every minute an issue goes undetected leads to players experiencing stalled downloads and abandoning installs. Preloads can fail silently across a region while the publisher has no visibility. A launch-day incident that needs to be resolved in minutes can into an hours-long outage because no one has a complete picture of what is happening across CDn providers.

The most dangerous place in your infrastructure isn’t inside any one CDN dashboard. It’s in the gaps between them where a cross-CDN incident can be invisible to your teams.

For this game publisher, which processes 88 billion log events daily across four providers, this wasn’t just an operational problem. It was a revenue problem.

This challenge isn’t an outlier. Multi-CDN fragmentation is the norm at enterprise gaming scale, and the financial exposure is significant across the industry.

What makes this worse is that support ticket volume and refund rates are lagging indicators that only surface after the damage is done. The player who churned a week later,  frustrated by a degraded experience during what should have been peak engagement, is harder to attribute. The player who never downloaded or complained may be invisible.

The gaming company deployed Hydrolix to eliminate gaps in CDN visibility. And here’s what happened: 

All four CDN providers now feed into a single, unified, queryable platform. Instead of four fragmented dashboards, engineers have one complete view of the entire delivery infrastructure, with sub-second query performance across hundreds of billions of events. When a regional issue starts, it surfaces across all four CDNs simultaneously, often before a single player is affected.

The operational impact was immediate. Engineers stopped context-switching and started solving problems quickly. Traffic could be rerouted before degradation became an outage. Studio partners gained real-time preload visibility, including completion rates by region and during launch, instead of post-mortem reports.

What unified, real-time visibility delivered:

• Sub-second query performance across hundreds of billions of events
• Unified incident detection across all 4 CDN providers simultaneously
• Real-time preload visibility for third-party studio partners, by region, during launch windows
• Client-level analytics revealing actual player experience, not just CDN-reported metrics

The platform has been extremely impactful, especially during major releases, where we can see global traffic patterns in real time. It was valuable, both for our team and our partners.”

Head of CDN Operations

This is where the investment pays off and where the gap between fragmented visibility and unified, real-time visibility is most clear.

On a regular cadence, the company pushes major updates for its flagship title. These are massive files delivered simultaneously to hundreds of millions of players who are at their keyboards the moment content drops. Every CDN is at peak load. Regional demand shifts as time zones roll through launch windows, magnifying the impact of issues that come up.

200+ billion log events within a 24-hour window

Before Hydrolix, navigating that window meant watching four separate systems and hoping the composite picture was accurate. A degradation in one region might be visible in one CDN’s logs and absent from another’s. By the time the team had a complete picture, players had already been affected and the incident had already escalated.

Now the team monitors all four CDNs in a single real-time view. Degradation is detected as soon as it begins on launch day. Routing decisions are made on complete data.

The result: Fewer incidents reach players. Those that do are contained faster. Launch windows are protected. A team that used to spend launch day triaging fragmented data now spends it managing delivery.

Multi-CDN environments are complex and generate massive volumes of data. The question is whether your team sees incidents before your players do, or after.

This company’s answer is unified, real-time visibility through Hydrolix. One complete view across four CDNs, in real time, at any scale. Incidents surface before they become outages, and engineers spend their time solving problems instead of searching for them.