A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed set of servers that are designed to get your web-based content into the hands of your users as fast as possible. CDNs produce CDN logs that can be analyzed, and this information is invaluable. Why? CDNs host servers all over the world and are designed to help you scale your traffic without maxing out your load balancers. A CDN also gives you added protection against many of the most common cyber attacks. This activity needs to be closely monitored.

Most developers and administrators think that adding a CDN-hosted static file improves performance. A CDN's fast edge servers cache content and deliver it based on the user’s geolocation. These cached servers are faster than a traditional single hosting server, and developers have received the benefit of convenience.

This summer has seen a series of outages and performance degradations from some of the world’s most widely used CDNs, including the June 8, 2021 Fastly outage (owing to DNS or configuration issues) and an Akamai outage on July 22, 2021 (also likely caused by DNS failure).

In case you haven’t noticed, video marketing is on fire right now with compelling statistics around this trend hard to ignore. And for good reason — everyone from large enterprises and educational institutions to community groups and entrepreneurs are incorporating richer content into their websites, such as images and videos. Hence, the importance of choosing a high-quality content delivery network (CDN) provider.

The content delivery network (CDN) has been an integral part of application infrastructure for more than two decades. A CDN is critical to the end-user experience, but it is no longer considered to be just a caching server. It has evolved to provide security from cyber threats, including DDOS attacks along with front end optimization. Although CDN services are now an indispensable part of any application infrastructure, visibility into CDN performance remains limited.

In today’s digital world, everything comes down to speed. It doesn’t matter if you have the most complex and good-looking site if it takes forever to load. There are various reasons why your web pages may load slowly, but no matter the cause, today I’m going to show you some useful tips and techniques on how to improve your website performance and speedand ensure a smooth user experience. But first things first.

On June 8, 2021, many of us were left staring at blank screens or “Service Unavailable” errors when trying to access the internet. The panic was shared by millions of people around the world. Everything from Spotify, Amazon, and Reddit to Vimeo, Twitch, and Pinterest was inaccessible to users. This major outage that impacted any service using Fastly. Here is a quick rundown of what happened and why.

This year, our team at Catchpoint put together the IT Monitoring Trends 2021 Report. We focus on seven key trends that will shape year two of our new, unstable normal. The goal: to help you as either a “boots on the ground” engineer or a C-level exec to know what to expect of the year ahead. We also share actionable best practices for how to shape your IT monitoring strategy. Multi-cloud and hybrid-IT management is one of the seven trends.

Fastly is an edge cloud platform that includes a content delivery network (CDN), as well as services for image optimization, video streaming, cloud security, and load balancing. These services are supported by a network of caches in different locations, which enables enterprise-scale companies to deliver applications to users as quickly as possible, even in times of peak traffic.

On one of our monthly check-in calls, the Director of Infrastructure and Operations at one of our largest customers, was telling me how the one big problem he was still trying to solve is optimizing their OPEX or at least make it more predictable. He cited a popular Content Delivery Network (CDN) that they spend millions with as an example. The company had launched a new service and he spoke about how the CDN cost had quadrupled.