They can see how potential issues in their delivery may be impacting aspects of the viewer experience such as start-up time, video exits (because of latency or buffering), etc. What’s more, CDN network and operations engineers can see other data to which they might not normally be privy. By giving access to the CDN reflected in the dashboard, the streaming operator can work hand-in-hand to identify root-cause issues involving that delivery network. For example, you might have a QoE dashboard which includes a CDN provider in addition to all of the telemetry coming from the player. Now that you have a video data platform, which is collecting, normalizing, and storing all of the data from the workflow, you can create dashboards representing different aspects of performance monitoring. In an ideal world, the video data platform will support programmatic access so that the data can be consumed by other services, like a visualization tool. As the owner of all the data for their streaming video technology stack, the operator can provide access to any third-parties, such as the various CDNs. In many cases, this will be the streaming operator. This platform serves the central purpose of aggregating all of the data, from different providers and sources, and normalizing it against a standard, agreed-upon set of data elements. The first step is to implement a video data platform. Step 1: Setup a Video Data Platform for Your CDN’s To facilitate that, though, everyone has to be able to trace data from each system to the same playback…and that means access to a unified set of data. Identifying root cause is often a collaborative approach between multiple CDNs, streaming operations, and other engineers. Savvy streaming providers often build complex systems and tools to not only switch quickly between CDNs but also to collect all that log data, normalize it, and visualize it for use by operations engineers.īut just understanding which CDN is doing well isn’t enough. But managing multiple delivery networks is hard enough when they all provide their own logs and their own visualization tools.
Resilience, consistency, scalability… achieving those streaming platform attributes requires the use of multiple CDNs. Without their huge networks and experienced engineers, streaming video experiences might be spotty at best. Content delivery networks (CDN) are critical to the success of streaming platforms.