With this white paper, we reveal the four essential analytics and reporting elements necessary for Operator CDNs to successfully measure and manage their content delivery networks.

1. The 4 Must-Haves for
any CDN Analytics &
Reporting Solution

2. The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting Solution | White Paper
Introduction
If you are a communications service provider, the decision on
whether to build your own content delivery network (CDN) can
involve considerable deliberation and a fair bit of
handwringing.
After all, despite appreciable benefits, building your own CDN
often involves a significant financial commitment, a lengthy
deployment and a Gantt chart full of dates and deliverables to
be managed.
Given the stakes then, operators must carefully vet CDN
platform providers to ensure that they provide the tools and
resources to successfully deploy and operate a content delivery
network. Amid all the complexities involved with this process,
however, some decisions can seem more abstract at the initial
stages and receive less rigorous scrutiny.
Analytics and reporting can often fall into this category.
This is often driven by the fact that the true significance of
reporting features and functionality don’t fully come to light
until a CDN is operational, at which point it’s too late to make
an easy change. What might have seemed inconsequential at
first can become critical once the content delivery network is
up and running.
To assure that prospective operator CDNs fully understand how
to evaluate different analytics solution, we’ve put together a list
of “The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting
Solution.”
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3. The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting Solution | White Paper
1. Multi-Dimensionality
Beauty is only skin deep. So too with
CDN analytics and reporting
solutions.
Most all CDN reporting
applications get high marks
for dashboard user interface
design these days, so it’s easy
to become distracted by the
pleasing aesthetics and lose
focus of the differences in the depth
and breadth of insight that each can
provide.
Simply put, if you select reporting solutions that provide only top-level
gross metrics — no matter how nicely packaged — you will only be able to
answer rudimentary questions like “what happened?” For some that may be
enough. For many, however, that won’t provide the level of insight
necessary to make sound decisions.
To answer more vital questions like “what’s causing a problem?” or “where
does a problem originate?” requires the ability to probe beneath the
surface data and:
• Drill down across multiple dimensions; to start at a summary level and
incrementally view increasingly detailed data.
• Aggregate data across dimensions; also referred to as a “roll-up.”
• Slice and dice the data any number of ways; to select one or more
dimensions and create subsets for specific analysis.
You will also want to make sure that your CDN reporting solution allows
you to quickly and easily build your own reports on the fly, without the
need for IT department intervention.
The combination of rich, multi-dimensional data and the ability to
dynamically analyze it using easy to use ad hoc queries provide a powerful
one-two punch to extract genuine insight from the information.
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4. The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting Solution | White Paper
2. Proven Track Record
With so much riding on your
decision, you will want to make sure
that the analytics and reporting
solution provided by the CDN
platform provider has been widely
deployed with other service
providers and has genuinely earned
the designation “carrier grade.”
Ask the platform providers that you
are considering if their analytics and reporting:
• Has been deployed at a large scale. What traffic level has it
been proven to handle? If you are a Tier 1 operator and the
platform provider has only handled smaller carriers, that
should be cause for concern.
• Is proven to support adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR)
protocols. Can it aggregate adaptive streaming data so that it
can be viewed by actual video assets rather than by
thousands of file fragments? Your ability to quickly and
accurately measure content assets will be nearly impossible
otherwise.
• Incorporates best practices gleaned from working closely
with telcos, cable operators and content providers. How long
has it been deployed in the field and under what
circumstances?
Only by evaluating criteria like the above can you be assured
that the analytics and reporting integrated into your CDN
platform has been battle tested in the field and proven to
withstand the demands required.
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5. The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting Solution | White Paper
3. Flexibility
The online video landscape is
constantly shifting, and video
delivery along with it.
Business models. Alliances
and partnerships. Product and
service offerings. They are all
constantly being revised and
refined to address market demands.
Which is why it is so critical that your CDN analytics and
reporting solution be flexible and extensible enough to
accommodate this fluid environment. When evaluating
solutions, you’ll want to make sure that they include:
• A multi-tenant architecture that supports a hierarchy of
different roles and permissions. That way, you can provide
reseller partners and online video content owners with their
own secure reporting portals in addition to your CDN
operator view. It’s not something that can be easily grafted
on later.
• APIs that enable you to share your data whatever way you
wish: to a data warehouse or database, to a corporate portal
or BI platform, to a billing system.
• Custom dimensions that allow you to model new elements of
your business processes as needed.
• Flexible administrative controls. Different information will be
appropriate for different users. You will want to be able to
easily manage access at the user or report level.
Whether you call it a pivot or a plan B, you’ll want to invest in
an analytics and reporting solution that affords you the
flexibility to explore new alternatives and change directions.
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6. The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting Solution | White Paper
4. Timely Reports
Time is a valuable currency.
When you need to mitigate problems
and get an accurate read on your
content delivery network, the freshness
of the data being analyzed is essential.
The value of data that is 10 hours old
can be significantly less than data that
is 10 minutes old.
The volume, variety and velocity of log files
that a CDN can generate can make it exceedingly difficult,
however, for a reporting solution to provide timely insight.
Doubly so if it’s rich, multi-dimensional data.
When considering a CDN analytics and reporting solution, pay
particular attention to the time it takes to process the data and
turn it into useful reports. How long does it take to ingest all
the data? How long to transform the data into meaningful
reports?
You’ll also want to consider another facet of time; the time to
value. Namely, how much time, effort and ongoing operating
expenses are you willing to incur before you begin reaping the
benefits?
The ideal scenario is an out-of-the-box application that can be
deployed quickly and which can also provide near real-time
reporting.
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7. The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting Solution | White Paper
The importance of multi-
dimensionality in practice
Your operations team will undoubtedly be very concerned
about maintaining high quality of service (QoS) levels. But to
truly deliver high QoS requires an ability to root
out and fix problems that can adversely affect
quality.
Many CDN analytics and reporting
solutions will feature dashboards that
track error status codes. But it’s of
negligible value to know, for instance,
that the network is experiencing a
lot of “404 - File Not Found” errors
if you are unable to determine why.
By leveraging multi-dimensional analytics and reporting, you
will also be able to determine what is causing the errors and
where the root cause of the problem lies.
• For instance, if you are considering launching a wholesale
CDN model — where you sell content delivery services to
media companies — you will want to drill down to see
which customers are experiencing the most 404 errors.
• From there you might want to drill down further to
determine the number of 404 errors by customer and the
percent of the total traffic that these errors represent. By
doing so, you will have a better sense for which customers
may be the most significantly impacted.
In this example, it may be that a link was pointing to a corrupt
file and that the problem can be easily remedied by replacing it
with a new file. Without multi-dimensional analytics and
reporting to deduce the problem, however, it would be like
looking for a needle in a haystack.
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8. The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting Solution | White Paper
The importance of real-time
measurement in practice
You will use your CDN analytics and reporting solution to root
out and fix problems but you’ll also want to leverage it to
preempt problems before they even occur.
One way to do this is to gain an understanding of
daily traffic patterns, then identify patterns that
deviate from the norm. This is important because
a variance from the norm may spell trouble. And
this is where the right CDN reporting application
can be invaluable.
To accurately provision capacity, you will want to
make sure that you can measure data in 5 minute
increments over a 24 hour span so that you can get
a precise read on the ebb and flow of traffic.
In one scenario, you may notice traffic that is exceeding
standard levels, which may signal looming capacity problems
that can result in poor quality of experience (QoE) for viewers.
• With the right reporting solution, you will be able to drill
down to view the traffic levels that correspond to each of
the points of presence (PoPs) in your network.
• From there you should be able to identify any edge
locations where the traffic spike may be particularly
pronounced and how it is trending.
• Ideally you will be able to investigate even further to
identify which content assets are driving the most traffic
growth so that you can quickly take corrective action.
Without the ability to interact with the data while it is still
fresh, you won’t be able to foresee and prevent as many
problems from escalating into full blown headaches.
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9. The 4 Must-Haves for any CDN Analytics & Reporting Solution | White Paper
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