For gaming companies, launch days are stressful. They have spent endless hours testing every layer of their content delivery networks (CDNs). After all, they must push massive files simultaneously through multiple CDNs to hundreds of millions of players around the world, all in different time zones. And while those players may live completely different lives, they all have one thing in common - they desire a buffer-free, error-free, reliable gaming experience.
Yet for CDN operations teams monitoring and managing four, seven, or in some cases even more CDNs, spotting issues that can disrupt that flawless experience can be difficult. That’s because each CDN is supported by a different provider, and each provider generates its own logs, metrics, and dashboards. When incidents emerge, engineers have to piece together the story by looking at data from different sources. They can’t immediately see if a regional degradation was isolated to one provider or part of a broader delivery issue, and must switch between dashboards, reconcile different logging formats and manually compare data. They spend precious minutes figuring out which metric means what, and whether two different CDN signals are describing the same problem.
By the time they spot the issue, oftentimes it’s too late. Stalled downloads, failed preloads or other errors have occurred. Affected users may abandon the game and post negative chatter on social networks. In other words, the delayed diagnosis becomes a customer-facing problem, a problem that a routing change may have prevented if it happened soon enough.
Customer experience aside, the broader economics of downtime creates urgency. ITIC's 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime study found that more than 90% of midsize and large enterprises reported average hourly downtime costs exceeding $300,000, while 41% of enterprises put the cost at $1 million to more than $5 million per hour.
So what can gaming companies do to detect issues immediately during live, mega events while managing multiple CDNs?
First, they should consolidate their CDN telemetry into a single platform, one that ingests, retains, correlates and presents insights in one dashboard. Then, data from all CDN providers feeds into one environment, which gives engineers a unified view of the delivery infrastructure. That makes spotting issues easier and faster. They can also query data in one place, and get responses faster.
By making that one change, teams can spot the root cause instantly without spending the first part of the incident assembling the evidence. For cross-CDN incidents, this is particularly important. For example, an issue may initially appear as a regional anomaly in one provider’s data while looking normal in another provider’s dashboard. Without a common analytics layer, engineers can’t determine if they are seeing separate issues or different manifestations of the same issue.
Unifying CDN data makes that comparison possible in real time. The question isn't simply, 'Is this CDN having a problem?' It's, 'What is the player experience across the delivery network, and where is that experience breaking down? That's the difference between looking at individual systems and actually understanding the full delivery path.
For example, our team worked with one gaming company that was planning for a global launch. Before bringing in Hydrolix, the team had to monitor four CDNs, and manually build a picture of performance. One provider’s logs may have spotted a degradation, but it was difficult to correlate with activities across the other CDNs. By the time engineers would have connected the relevant information to make a confident routing decision, players would have already been impacted.
The company brought in our team to avoid that scenario. They needed a single, real-time, correlated view into the performance across all their CDNs. With a real-time view, the company’s engineering team could be proactive instead of reactive. They gave third-party studio partners visibility into preload performance by region during the launch, instead of receiving a postmortem view of completion rates afterwards. They could also query faster so when something went wrong, they could see and remediate it instantly, instead of taking time to manually correlate data and delaying the entire fix.
The gaming company also received client-level analytics to see what players were experiencing vs. relying on metrics reported by each CDN provider. That matters because one provider may report no issues while users in a certain region are experiencing degradation in download performance. By looking at client-level and CDN-level data, engineers can uncover those discrepancies and pinpoint where the player experience is degrading.
In other words, the team had a broader operational view by analyzing together their CDN performance, regional behavior and player-facing outcomes. That kind of visibility can turn a potentially hours-long investigation into seconds. When all CDN data can be queried together, there are fewer places for an incident to hide.
For large game launches, multi-CDN delivery may be essential, but the data doesn’t need to be fragmented. Hundreds of billions of CDN events can be unified into a real-time view, that’s queryable in seconds, and so incidents can be spotted and fixed instantly, before users are impacted.
About the Author: Abby Ross is Head of Corporate Communications at Hydrolix, where she built the company's communications function from the ground up. Her corporate communications program includes earned media, analyst relations, awards programs, customer marketing, original research, and GEO/AEO/SEO support. Abby's broader career spans corporate communications, channel and partner marketing, content and messaging, and go-to-market strategy across B2B technology and cybersecurity. She began her career as a bilingual television news reporter for CBS, ABC, and Fox affiliates — a foundation that continues to shape her storytelling-driven approach to corporate communications today.
