Content delivery networks are like your underground plumbing. You don’t see them unless you work for a CDN provider. Yet without them, you can’t do anything online. No movies, no shopping, no video games, no live sports. Nothing that involves an application over the internet works without CDNs. Their importance in our daily lives is reflected in the numbers: the global CDN market reached $27.59 billion in 2024 and is expected to hit $144.91 billion by 2034.
That demand puts pressure on content providers. They rely on CDNs to deliver content quickly and reliably to viewers worldwide, across all kinds of devices, whenever viewers want it. Viewers expect higher resolutions than ever and are never willing to accept buffering. To meet and exceed those expectations, content providers must utilize their CDN signals to identify any issues impacting the quality of experience and resolve them promptly. The faster they spot a problem in the delivery pipeline, the faster they can fix it before viewers notice.
Here’s the challenge: most content providers use multiple CDNs, and each one produces terabyte-scale data. For video streaming, that can easily result in dozens of terabytes a day for major providers. For major events like the Super Bowl, it can exceed a petabyte a day. We’re talking millions of log lines per second, each in a different format, schema, and delivery mechanism that must drive insights in seconds.
Ideally, providers utilize a real-time data analytics platform that can ingest that volume and deliver insights in seconds, allowing them to spot issues and make adjustments, such as load balancing across CDNs, to maintain a smooth viewing experience. In reality, though, there aren’t many platforms that can actually deliver at that scale, and without it, problems slip through.
The Top Four Challenges Service Operators Face
When it comes to extracting insights from massive CDN datasets, our experts at Hydrolix see four recurring pain points:
1. No unified view across multiple CDN providers
Operators piece together disparate dashboards instead of seeing everything in one place.
2. The visibility-cost tradeoff
They either lose visibility through data sampling or face unsustainable costs as long-term retention expenses skyrocket with data volume.
3. Technical metrics without business context
Raw CDN logs display technical data, but operators require business-level insights, such as “which content is underperforming?” or “where are users experiencing errors?”
4. Incidents impact users before data is even queryable
By the time operators manually piece together data to find root causes, the incident has already harmed the business.
What the Solution Looks Like
The fix requires four components:
1. Data consolidation
Consolidating data into a single high-performance layer for easy correlation and a single dashboard for fast visualization. Insights from each CDN must appear in a unified view, and issues are flagged instantly.
2. Fast time to insight
The faster operators can spot an issue, its origin, and root cause, the faster they can fix it. From the moment CDN data is ingested to when it can be viewed in CDN health, without custom engineering work, it should take minutes, as days may be too long.
3. Technical and business-level insights
Data tells a story, and most stories begin with a high-level overview and then drill down into the details of the problem. The way operators view their data needs to follow the same flow, especially since not all operators are seasoned data architects. They need to see high-level metrics to specific problems, such as “which content is underperforming,” “where are users experiencing errors,” and “what’s my cache efficiency by region.” And then they must drill down into raw logs to understand root causes, pinpoint within which CDNs issues live and where, and identify what or who is impacted.
4. Affordable visibility
Data sampling or discarding some data leaves a partial picture of what’s happening within the content delivery pipeline. When issues arise, key data may not exist, making it challenging to identify the root cause and apply the correct fixes accurately. Companies need a way to ingest all their CDN data, regardless of the number of CDNs, without exceeding their budgets.
The business impact of these components is significant. Operators can reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) by spotting CDN issues in seconds instead of weeks and fixing them before viewers notice. They only have one interface to view all their CDN data, consolidated and correlated, rather than piecing together multiple dashboards. With a single view, they can see the performance and health status of a hybrid network of CDNs in real-time, diagnose root causes more quickly, and improve the quality of experience – all without users being aware of it.
Multi-CDN visibility with real-time data insights
Hydrolix specializes in real-time data analytics with a focus on multi-CDN observability. We recently announced CDN Insights, a solution that tackles the pain points of monitoring and measuring performance across multiple CDNs. Hydrolix ingests terabyte-scale CDN data, retains it affordably, and delivers a consolidated dashboard of insights in seconds.
With Hydrolix, operators gain both high-level and granular insights, including edge cache hit percentage, peak throughput, 4xx response counts, and more. They can segment CDN metrics by time, ASN, hostname, and edge PoP to isolate performance issues across every layer of the content delivery stack. Issues get spotted instantly, reducing MTTR to minutes.
The multi-CDN market is growing at a rate of 50 percent annually. That means more data, more potential issues, and more opportunities to use CDN data to deliver the best quality of experience.
