Reporting & Analytics
Both the CDN operator and content owners delivering their content over a CDN require business intelligence to evaluate the performance of the CDN and to optimize business decision-making. The Velocix CDN integrates a set of reporting and analytics capabilities and provides the interfaces required to exchange raw data with third party reporting and analytics tools. Velocix appliances continually record information on incoming and outgoing traffic on per user, per object and time basis. These logs are the basis for the reports generated by the Velocix reporting functions and for the information exchanged with third party tools.
Logs are created on events related to all objects in the CDN, independently of their format or stream protocol. This comprehensive scope includes reporting for HTTP Adaptive Streaming where an object may span several files, all of them in an origin sever that may not be under the control of the CDN operator. The Velocix CDN allows the service provider to define the set of files that comprise an object through the specification of their paths in the origin server. The logging system logs access to them as a single entity.
Being a multi-tenant solution that supports multiple different customers, Velocix reports provide only data that is specific to each account. The reports can be classified into three categories: usage reports, quota management reports and network appliance reports.
Usage reports focus on the content delivered. The metrics can be aggregated across all delivery nodes in the CDN or broken down: by object, by customer, by delivery appliance or by geographic location going down to the granularity of the metropolitan area.
Quota management reports allow content owners and service providers to know how much of their budgeted CDN resources they are using. Network Appliance Reports are hardware usage reports that show the benefit provided by the CDN.
For integration with third party reporting and analytics tools the Velocix CDN provides two APIs:
- An ATOM based interface through which third party tools poll and receive responses on new log files available. These log files comprise details on events related to delivery, acquisition (either through pre-publishing or through reverse proxy) and request routing.
- A real time event notification API based on XML over HTTP through which delivery appliances and shield caches notify of events as they occur.