New Amazon CloudFront Cache Statistics, Popular Objects Report, and More Timely Access Logs

Posted on: Oct 21, 2014

You can now view detailed Cache Statistics Reports and the list of your most Popular Objects delivered by Amazon CloudFront. These reports are available by visiting the Amazon CloudFront Reports & Analytics dashboard in the AWS Management Console. These new reports complement the Usage Charts that are already available to track trends in your usage and the near real-time operational metrics available via CloudWatch that were released last week.

The Cache Statistics Reports include:

  • Total Requests: Shows the total number of requests for all HTTP status codes.
  • Percentage of Viewer Requests by Result Type: Shows hits, misses, and errors as a percentage of total viewer requests.
  • Bytes Transferred to Viewers: Shows the total number of bytes served to viewers and the bytes served just for cache misses.
  • HTTP Status Codes: Shows viewer requests by HTTP status code - 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx.
  • Percentage of GET Requests that Didn't Finish Downloading: Shows the percentage of total requests that didn't finish downloading the requested object.

The Popular Objects Report shows request count, cache hit and cache miss counts, as well as error rates for the 50 most popular objects during the specified period. This helps you understand which content is most popular among your viewers, or identify any issues (such as high error rates) with your most requested objects.

There are no additional charges for the Cache Statistics or Popular Objects Reports. You do not need to make any changes to your CloudFront configuration. You can access these reports via the Amazon CloudFront Management Console and select the appropriate report under the Reports and Analytics link in the navigation pane

In addition, we've made several improvements to how we are delivering CloudFront Access Logs to your S3 bucket. Access logs will now be delivered to your S3 bucket via Amazon Kinesis multiple times per hour and these logs will generally be available within an hour of your viewers requesting that object. You may also now get fewer files per hour as a result of improved file batching. If you have already configured your CloudFront distribution to deliver access logs to your S3 bucket, you do not need to make any additional configuration changes. For details about CloudFront Access Logs, please review the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

To learn more about CloudFront Reports and Analytics capabilities, please join our webinar: "Introduction to Amazon CloudFront Reporting Features" on Nov 20th 2014 at 10:00AM PT. This webinar will demonstrate how you can use our suite of reporting features to monitor Amazon CloudFront usage and availability. You can register for this webinar here.