Content Delivery Networks (CDN) have been an inherent part of modern software infrastructure for years. They allow for faster and more reliable web-content delivery to users regardless of their location and an additional level of protection against DDoS Attacks and server failure. But just like any infrastructure service, they still fail from time to time and have their quirks. Enter CDN monitoring tools, providing insights on the performance of your CDN and helping troubleshoot issues. While a CDN monitoring tool is definitely a must-have in your observability stack, many options are available. From basic uptime monitors to sophisticated RUM solutions, each tool comes with its own feature set…and its own set of challenges.
In this post, we’ll dive into some of the most common challenges encountered with CDN monitoring tools and how to resolve them.
Challenges of CDN monitoring tools
Getting full visibility of a CDN’s performance
While usually cheap and simple to set up, some monitoring tools do not offer comprehensive data on metrics such as latency, cache hit rates, and error rates. Or it can be that it is the analysis side of the monitoring that is lacking, and you find yourself doing all the grunt work to piece historical and real-time data together to get the context that you need. No one enjoys digging through different layers of the CDN infrastructure to figure out which metrics might impact others and why, especially when time is of the essence.
If you want to avoid this, look for tools with customizable dashboards, real-time monitoring, and historical data analysis features. Bonus points if they offer built-in correlation analysis and anomaly detection algorithms. They will automatically highlight your issues and save you time in the long run!
Setting up a monitoring tool tailored to a specific use case
Monitoring tools can be a learning curve, especially if you are trying to tailor them to a specific use case. The user interface can be difficult to navigate, the configuration options poorly documented, and in some cases, the customization itself is limited.
Some monitoring tools out there are flexible and boast a wide range of customization options. Picking widely adopted tools is usually a good idea because you can benefit from online community support. That said, there are also great support teams that go above and beyond to fine-tune your setup to match your exact needs.
Integrating CDN monitoring with the rest of an observability stack
Some monitoring tools can be difficult to integrate with the rest of your observability stack (or even your infrastructure in general!). This usually leaves you with 2 choices: either monitor your infrastructure on two separate platforms or invest a lot of hours setting up convoluted and flaky solutions to integrate the platforms together. Beyond the inconvenience of a disjointed observability setup, this can create a vendor lock-in problem.
The best thing that you can do to save time and avoid vendor lock-in is to prioritize monitoring tools that offer seamless integration capabilities with your existing stack. Look for solutions that support open standards and APIs, so you can easily integrate them with a wide range of monitoring platforms, data sources, and third-party tools. You can also adopt a unified observability platform that consolidates monitoring, logging, and tracing functionalities into a single, cohesive solution.
Getting rid of false alarms
Like any monitoring tool, CDN monitoring tools may sometimes trigger false alarms. They can be caused by transient network issues, fluctuations in traffic patterns, or misconfigurations and can quickly become a problem in big numbers. Engineers spend a lot of time troubleshooting problems that don’t exist, which can lead to actual issues being dismissed as false alarms and ignored for lengthy periods.
To prevent that, choose a monitoring tool to customize alerting thresholds and conditions based on your specific CDN performance metrics and traffic patterns. You can also choose a tool that offers advanced anomaly detection algorithms, which should help differentiate between genuine issues and transient anomalies.
Keeping costs down
Some CDN monitoring tools may come with significant costs, especially if they offer advanced features or support for large-scale deployments. This can be a problem for smaller budgets, who then settle for what seems to be a cheaper solution. But some tools can be pretty opaque about how they charge their customers and what seems like a good deal on paper actually turns into a bad surprise when you receive your bill.
To avoid these bad surprises, choose a solution that bills you for what you use, allows you to scale up or down easily, and has a transparent pricing policy. Ensure you have access to different storage options depending on your needs and that the pricing structure aligns with your anticipated usage patterns.
CDN monitoring with Coralogix
Coralogix is a fully managed observability platform, which includes CDN Monitoring. While offering complete CDN Monitoring capabilities, Coralogix is built with a unique, cost-conscious approach in mind. With Coralogix’s TCO (Total Cost Of Ownership) Optimizer, ingested data that demands lightning-fast querying around the clock can be routed to more expensive indexing and hot storage. Meanwhile, less searched data can find its home in highly affordable archive storage with Coralogix Remote Query ensuring swift querying and dashboarding without the overhead of indexing and storage.
Our next-generation alerting features, including dynamic alerting, extensive alert types, and out-of-the-box dashboards, allow you to identify abnormal behavior, such as high volumes of bot traffic, error rates, and suboptimal CDN usage. You can also use the incident management screen, to visualize alerts, identify triggers, drill down into underlying logs and metrics, debug and efficiently manage incidents. There is even an API that allows you to automatically manage your alerts based on your chosen events.
Coralogix also has the benefit of being incredibly flexible. With a mission to make observability accessible to all, it actively fights vendor lock-in and promotes open-source integrations and tooling. It offers a ‘plug-and-play’ experience, making the integration process smooth and hassle-free.
Lastly, our exceptional support is available 24/7 with an in-app chat service and response times under 1 minute. The support team has the reputation of being extremely knowledgeable and is always happy to help tailor the setup to your exact needs.
Conclusion
There are many resources online to help you pick a CDN monitoring tool that suits your needs, so feel free to have a look in more detail. Just keep in mind that there are a few tools out there that are easy to set up and integrate, and provide a wide range of metrics and analysis capabilities while keeping costs down, so don’t settle for less!
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