CDN Reporting and Analytics

Reporting and Analytics is a crucial component of a Content Delivery Network (CDN). In simple words, Reporting/Analytics software helps the CDN to find out if the delivery network is doing good and how they can do better / improve the business.

The CDN reports/analytics can be used to

• Monitor the performance of the servers and caches
• Plan for capacity management / upgrades
• Monetize by creating advertisements or by delivering premium content to users
• Fine-tune the caching and delivery policies to optimize the media delivery (for ex., how much is served from cache vs. origin server)
• Detect attacks or unauthorized access to content

Reporting/Analytics Servers produce two types of reports:

• Real time reports (mostly generated based on statistics / counters retrieved via SNMP or through CSV files from the caching/media servers)
• Historical reports (mostly generated based on access logs)

Reports are organized/presented based on:

• Time (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly & yearly media delivery performance reports)
• Content (content popularity, content type, server domain(s), server response status and content referrers based reports)
• Geography (user's Country/State/City/Region, and ISP based reports)
• Media client / player (number of pauses made, number of seeks made, buffering etc.,)

There are a number of off-the-shelf CDN reporting/analytics software available in the market.

1) Skytide

http://www.skytide.com

2) Sawmill (requires some customization)

http://www.sawmill.net/

3) Casterstats

http://www.casterstats.com/

4) Ooyala (video specific analytics/reports based information/statistics obtained from video player)

http://www.ooyala.com/

Vendors such as Akamai, Cisco, Edgecast, Limelight, Media Melon, NSA CDN, Azion, Jetstream, Internap, Verivue, and Velocix provide integrated CDN reporting and analytics software.