Announcing Real-Time Log Delivery with the Edgecast Content Delivery Network

By Tony Ferrari, Sr. Product Manager, CDN Analytics, Corey Kasten, Senior Software Engineer, and Seth Mason, Senior Engineering Manager

Knowledge is power. Power to understand your CDN’s usage, identify problems and make decisions that improve user experiences.

There’s also a critical corollary to this: Timeliness. Great data sets delivered in as little as five minutes after a request can hurt your business just as easily as not having the right data. The faster you’re able to gather information, the sooner you can turn knowledge into insights and action.

As a part of our continuous efforts to provide our customers with the most up-to-date features and services, we’ve released our Real-Time Log Delivery (RTLD).

RTLD helps Edgecast CDN customers understand at a granular level how well our CDN is performing and empowers them to make better-informed decisions and take action to benefit users, sooner.

What is RTLD?

Real-Time Log Delivery is a log streaming service that delivers edge request data to the endpoint of your choice in less than 60 seconds — 500% faster than any competitor. In fact, it’s the fastest log delivery in the industry.

The sooner you know how your CDN is performing, or if there’s trouble, the sooner you can make adjustments that prevent downtime and improve revenue. With RTLD, you know what’s happening with your CDN nearly as fast as it’s happening, and can respond faster than ever.

Here’s how RTLD works

Each time there is a request for content, the Edgecast CDN tracks that request via a log entry. These logs contain metadata about the request, such as who requested it, where it was served from, what the content was, and the performance quality of our response. More than 20 data fields are currently available. You select the information you’ll receive, avoiding data that isn’t relevant to your business needs. If you prefer, we can provide pre-built reports and dashboards.

RTLD parses logs by any 4xx or 5xx error. You’ll get alerts of these errors in real time. You’ll also get real-time awareness to configuration issues. As well as the ability to pinpoint a specific problem area sooner, so you can solve problems sooner.

This data creates a historical record that builds an analytics base, which is sent to you in near real time. With this data arriving almost as quickly as it happens, you can make your most important decisions regarding monitoring, reporting, troubleshooting and alerting sooner — much sooner than you’re doing right now. For example, when there’s a problem with a specific URL or IP address, you’ll be able to assign the right people to solve the problem faster. Rather than wasting time figuring out who to assign to fix the problem.

Broad compatibility

Real-Time Log Delivery currently integrates with:

• Amazon S3
• A web server via HTTP POST/PUT
• Splunk
• Sumo Logic
• And others

You’ll receive data in JSON. Data is kept secure by transporting over HTTPS/TLS. These features are all built for simplicity, allowing you to easily integrate, ingest and parse for your business intelligence use cases.

Real-Time Log Delivery is a fully managed service, it automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration — you’re in control. And the data is compressed before it’s delivered, minimizing the amount of storage used at your destination — freeing storage on your side to be used as you need.

Delivering value

Another advantage of RTLD is usage-based billing. You only pay for the amount of data you transmit through the service. There is no minimum fee or setup cost. You get full transparency and control over your investment.

Use case: RTLD in action

RTLD is currently being used to help businesses make better decisions, sooner. A leading image-centric lifestyle website needed to improve its website’s performance to handle fluctuations in regional demand. Utilizing RTLD to track metadata enabled them to understand user demand and make CDN decisions that optimized performance, delivering the consistent quality of experience their customers expect 24 x 7.

Get started in 10 minutes

RTLD can be configured for existing Edgecast CDN customer in as little as 10 minutes. Here’s all you need to do.

1. Log into your portal at myedgecast.com
2. Select what data and log fields are most beneficial for you
3. Tell us where you would like the data to be sent

You’ll start seeing logs in just a few minutes.

If you’re not currently a customer, please contact us. There are multiple advantages to our Edgecast CDN in addition to RTLD, including superior performance, enterprise features and capabilities that can dramatically improve the performance and security of your website.

Better intelligence sooner. Better decisions sooner.

Having data delivered as quickly as possible is a smart starting point for improving the day in, day out functionality of your website. Data you gather utilizing RTLD also lays the foundation for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, which can lead to even more powerful insights, and proactive changes and actions that reduce network issues, user churn, increases user satisfaction and drives even greater revenue.

The features and benefits of RTLD shared in this article are just the beginning. We plan to add more log fields, delivery destinations and customization in the months to come.

We’ll deliver news about all the updates in as near real time as possible.

Check out our other blog posts to stay up-to-date with our latest news and updates.

Have questions? Please reach out to support@verizondigitalmedia.com.