How to achieve CDN observability with Amazon CloudFront logs

Monitoring the performance of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is essential for maintaining a positive user experience, and using logs for this purpose allows for proactive issue detection and troubleshooting. The process involves monitoring key metrics like cache hits/misses and HTTP response codes, and setting up alerts for anomalies. Amazon CloudFront can be used to monitor CDN performance by utilizing real-time logs, which are streamed to platforms like New Relic for analysis. This guide explains how to set up real-time log forwarding from CloudFront to New Relic via AWS services such as Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose, enabling the creation of real-time alerts and dashboards. It also covers setting up a log parsing rule in New Relic to make sense of unformatted logs using Grok patterns. The blog provides detailed steps for setting up the necessary infrastructure and configuring the systems to ensure that CDN logs are efficiently monitored and analyzed, facilitating timely identification of performance issues.