The company needed a practical way to bring CDN observability into its existing platform, where its broader observability strategy already existed. The objective was to improve visibility, accelerate issue detection, and give operations teams a clearer view of customer-facing performance during both normal operations and high traffic retail events.

We helped the customer establish a unified CDN observability model using Akamai delivery logs, edge security telemetry, Synthetic Monitoring, and Real User Monitoring. The result was stronger operational visibility, faster incident response, better cache and origin awareness, and a more scalable approach to monitoring digital commerce.

About the Customer

The customer is a Fortune Global 500 company in the UK with a large digital presence across ecommerce, customer support, and mobile experiences. Its platform supports high volumes of traffic across product browsing, promotional campaigns, loyalty activity, and online transactions.

For this organization, digital performance is directly tied to business outcomes. Slow page loads, intermittent failures, or degraded checkout flows can impact conversion, increase abandonment, and place added pressure on customer support teams. While the customer was already using an observability platform and Akamai for content delivery and edge protection, CDN-specific telemetry was not yet integrated into a unified operational model.

Customer Challenge

As digital traffic and platform complexity grew, the retailer’s existing approach to CDN monitoring became harder to scale and less effective for proactive operations.

Key challenges included:

Limited visibility into CDN delivery performance
The team could observe individual logs and isolated signals, but lacked a consolidated view of request patterns, latency, status trends, cache behavior, and geography-specific performance.

Fragmented operational context
CDN logs, security events, synthetic checks, and customer experience data were not consistently viewed together. This made troubleshooting slower and often required multiple teams to piece together the source of an issue.

Pressure during peak traffic periods
Promotions, seasonal events, and product launches created sudden traffic increases. The retailer needed a way to detect performance degradation, cache inefficiencies, and regional anomalies before they affected revenue-critical journeys.

Difficulty connecting infrastructure health with customer experience
It was not enough to know whether the CDN was responding. The customer needed to understand whether users were actually experiencing slow pages, broken assets, or inconsistent behavior across key retail journeys.

Need to extend observability without adding unnecessary complexity
The customer wanted to build on its existing observability investment rather than create a separate operational process for CDN monitoring.

These challenges made it difficult to respond quickly to incidents, prioritize remediation effectively, and maintain consistent service quality during high-demand periods.

Proposed Solution

We designed a unified CDN observability solution within the customer’s existing observability platform. The goal was to create a clear, scalable, and operationally useful model for monitoring content delivery, customer-facing performance, and edge security.

The solution combined several telemetry sources into a single observability framework:

• Akamai DataStream 2 logs for request, response, cache, geography, and edge delivery visibility
• Akamai security event data for edge security monitoring and suspicious traffic analysis
• Dashboards and log-based metrics for operational reporting and proactive alerting
• Synthetic Monitoring for external validation of availability, DNS, TLS, and critical user journeys
• Real User Monitoring (RUM) to measure actual customer experience across key digital touchpoints

Rather than simply collecting more logs, the implementation focused on delivering visibility that teams could use in real operational scenarios. That included performance oversight, incident detection, cache effectiveness analysis, and customer journey monitoring during high traffic retail events.

Solution Overview

Unified CDN Visibility

The first priority was to centralize CDN telemetry in the customer’s observability platform and organize it into meaningful dimensions such as hostname, request path, geography, content type, response codes, edge locations, and cache outcomes.

This gave the customer a consistent way to monitor delivery behavior across storefronts, customer support pages, browse journeys, and transaction paths. Teams could now see request volumes, latency distributions, status code trends, and path-level performance in a single operational view.

As a result, the customer gained better day-to-day visibility and a faster way to determine whether an issue was isolated to a specific route, region, or customer segment.

Performance Monitoring and Experience Assurance

To improve performance oversight, we enabled monitoring around CDN latency, regional response patterns, and status code trends for high-traffic pages and business-critical paths. This helped teams identify slowdowns earlier and understand whether they were associated with particular storefronts, geographies, or request types.

We complemented this with Synthetic Monitoring for key retail journeys such as homepage access, product navigation, search, cart, and checkout. These tests provided an external view of availability and responsiveness from selected locations.

To validate actual user impact, we aligned CDN telemetry with RUM data. This gave teams the ability to assess whether delivery issues were visible to real customers and whether specific problems were affecting page load performance, asset delivery, or conversion-critical flows.

Incident Detection and Operational Response

We implemented monitors for rising error rates, traffic drops, unusual latency shifts, and geographic anomalies. This allowed the retailer to detect emerging issues earlier and respond before they developed into broader customer-facing incidents.

Because telemetry was consolidated, teams could move more efficiently from alert to investigation. They were able to correlate CDN performance signals, customer experience patterns, and related application behavior without relying on disconnected tools or manual cross-referencing.

This was especially important during retail peak periods, when rapid triage can directly influence conversion and customer satisfaction.

Cache Visibility and Origin Protection

We also focused on improving visibility into cache effectiveness and origin dependency. The customer needed to understand whether high-volume content was being served efficiently and whether avoidable cache misses were increasing load on origin systems.

By exposing cache behavior in operational dashboards, the team could identify uncached high-traffic paths, compare latency by cache outcome, and highlight patterns that could affect scalability during promotions or traffic spikes.

This provided a stronger foundation for improving delivery efficiency and protecting origin infrastructure under heavy demand.

Security and Traffic Risk Monitoring

To strengthen traffic risk visibility, we incorporated Akamai security event telemetry into the observability platform model. This enabled the retailer to monitor suspicious request patterns, rule-triggered activity, and unusual traffic segments in the same context as delivery performance.

This was valuable not only for security operations but also for broader platform resilience. Automated or suspicious traffic can distort baselines, increase load, and complicate root cause analysis during active incidents. Consolidating these signals helped the customer distinguish between legitimate demand surges and unwanted traffic patterns more effectively.

Outcomes and Business Impact

The CDN observability solution delivered measurable operational value for the retailer.

Centralized Visibility

• Established a unified view of CDN traffic, delivery performance, cache behavior, and security signals within their observability platform
• Standardized dashboards and monitors for key digital journeys and storefront environments
• Improved visibility across geographies, paths, and high-value retail transactions

Improving Campaign Readiness

• During promotions and seasonal peaks, the customer can now quickly detect traffic spikes, rising errors, and regional slowdowns, helping teams respond before performance issues affect conversions.

Faster Incident Detection and Resolution

• Reduced time to identify path-specific failures, latency spikes, and regional issues
• Improved triage by correlating CDN telemetry with synthetic validation and real user experience data
• Enabled earlier response during campaign windows and other high-demand events

Improved Customer Experience Oversight

• Provided a clearer understanding of how CDN performance affected browse, account, cart, and checkout journeys
• Helped teams distinguish infrastructure-level health from actual customer experience impact
• Supported proactive management of customer-facing performance issues

Better Cache and Origin Efficiency

• Increased visibility into cache outcomes and origin dependency
• Highlighted optimization opportunities for high-traffic content and delivery patterns
• Improved operational awareness during periods of elevated demand

Stronger Security Context

• Consolidated edge security telemetry with delivery observability in one platform
• Improved the ability to identify suspicious traffic patterns and assess their operational relevance
• Supported better coordination between operations and security teams

Scalable Operations

• Extended observability through the customer’s existing observability platform 
• Reduced reliance on fragmented workflows and manual investigation methods
• Created a monitoring model that can scale with future growth in traffic, storefront complexity, and business-critical journeys

Conclusion

By building a robust  CDN observability posture, we helped the customer move from fragmented monitoring to a more complete and operationally useful model for digital performance, connecting delivery telemetry, security events, synthetic validation, and real user experience into a single view that enabled faster response and better decision-making. For a retail organization, this created value well beyond infrastructure monitoring, improving visibility into customer-impacting issues and strengthening resilience during peak traffic periods.

About Crest Data

As an Advanced Datadog Partner specializing in Observability, Crest Data brings the expertise to help enterprises build scalable, insight-led observability solutions that protect digital experience at scale.