Companies Face Four Major Challenges in Data Insights Management

The rapid expansion of the Content Delivery Network (CDN) market, projected to grow from $27.59 billion in 2024 to $144.91 billion by 2034, underscores the critical role these infrastructures play in online activities. CDNs enable streaming, e-commerce, and gaming, yet many companies grapple with the complexities of managing vast amounts of data generated by multiple CDNs. This challenge can significantly impact service delivery and user experience.

Providers are under pressure to meet high consumer expectations for seamless video quality and instant access. To address this, operators must detect and resolve issues within their delivery pipelines swiftly. This task is complicated by the reliance on multiple CDNs, each producing massive amounts of data. Major streaming platforms can generate tens of terabytes of logs daily, with spikes during significant live events exceeding a petabyte. The differing formats and schemas of these logs create a daunting challenge for operators, who need to convert this data into actionable insights almost instantaneously.

Identifying Key Challenges in Data Management

According to industry insights, operators frequently encounter four primary challenges in data management:

1. **No Unified View**: Each CDN presents its own set of dashboards and data formats, leading to a fragmented understanding of performance metrics.
2. **Visibility vs. Cost Tradeoff**: Storing comprehensive logs can be financially burdensome, while sampling may obscure critical details necessary for troubleshooting.
3. **Metrics Lacking Context**: CDN logs are highly technical; operators require business-level insights to identify underperforming content, user errors, and problematic regions.
4. **Delayed Incident Understanding**: If data is not readily queryable, operators often sift through clues manually, leading to delayed responses and increased user dissatisfaction.

These challenges highlight the urgent need for operators to streamline their data processes to improve responsiveness and overall service quality.

Strategies for Tackling Data Insight Challenges

To address these pressing issues, operators must implement four essential strategies:

1. **Consolidated Data Management**: All CDN data should be integrated into a single high-performance layer, providing a unified interface for operators.
2. **Rapid Insight Access**: Data must be queryable within minutes, enabling teams to quickly identify and resolve issues.
3. **Comprehensive Visibility**: Operators require an overview that highlights critical failures while also allowing for deep dives into raw logs for root cause analysis.
4. **Affordable Full Data Retention**: Operators need a cost-effective method to retain all CDN data across providers to avoid gaps caused by sampling.

With these elements in place, companies can significantly reduce their mean time to resolution from weeks to mere minutes. This transformation allows teams to monitor all CDNs from one dashboard, enabling them to detect and address issues proactively before users are affected.

Hydrolix is at the forefront of addressing these challenges, offering real-time analytics tailored for multi-CDN environments. Their latest solution, CDN Insights, is designed to manage terabyte-scale data efficiently, retain it cost-effectively, and deliver insights within seconds. This enables operators to track vital metrics such as cache hit rates, peak throughput, and error rates, with the ability to analyze performance by various criteria, including time, Autonomous System Number (ASN), hostname, or edge Point of Presence (PoP).

The multi-CDN market is growing at an impressive rate of approximately 50 percent annually. As this growth continues, the complexity of data management will increase, necessitating advanced tools capable of transforming extensive datasets into clear, actionable insights for operators. By embracing these solutions, companies can enhance their operational efficiency and maintain superior service quality in a competitive landscape.