CDN Strategy Blog

2003. StreamStat is a fully rewritten, highly optimized, commercialized version of the first rudimentary scripts I had for processing our media server log files.

Media server log files are the most detailed, rich and exact resources for analysis of viewing behaviour of streaming content.

If you use multiple servers and multiple services, the challenge is to get the log files from all the servers on a central server, then merge the log files into global log files.

Fortunately most media servers log W3C compliant. Still there are variations which need to be sorted out. And some media servers produce horrible data. Data in the wrong columns. Turn off Windows Media servers cached delivery logging! Customer PC date and time stamps instead of server date and time stamps. Double entries. Sigh. We called it a bug. Microsoft said: we won’t fix it. Hmm okay?

So we started to analyse all the logs first. And then wrote code to work around bugs and variations. The result was beautiful merged logs.

Then we added filters. To sort logs per CDN, per customer. And then we could add all kinds of analyzers. The most used are:

• Traffic per user per period. So the CDN can send a bill for used traffic.
• Graphical viewing analysis. So content owners can oversee the popularity of their assets, per hour, day, week, month, year, per geography, per ISP. Viewing time, traffic reports.

StreamStat is a rock-solid log processing service for CDN’s! 100% unique IP. The emphasis is on log processing and filtering. Customers can add their own analyzers.

We made StreamStat an integrated part of our CDN technology suite. StreamStat now supports log processing from all the popular media delivery services.