Introduction: The Hidden Cost of CDN Blind Spots‍

Every second, your content delivery network is generating thousands of logs that tell a critical story about your application's performance, security, and user experience. For large enterprises, this can mean terabytes of log data every day – data that contains invaluable insights about your business.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: most organizations capture only a small fraction of their CDN logs, and they retain that limited data for just days or weeks. This isn't because engineering teams don't understand the value of this data. It's because the economics of traditional logging solutions make comprehensive CDN logging prohibitively expensive.

The result? Critical blind spots that can be extremely costly during outages, security breaches, or major events. 
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Welcome to what we call the "flywheel of compromises":

1. Cost: Traditional logging vendors charge egregious per-GB rates that make comprehensive CDN logging unaffordable
2. Coverage: Companies respond by severely limiting what logs they collect and how long they retain them
3. Complexity: To compensate for coverage gaps, teams cobble together multiple different logging solutions, creating a management nightmare (in our experience 5-8 different solutions is not unusual) 
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This isn't just inefficient – it's a fundamentally broken approach to logging that leaves organizations vulnerable and flying blind. In an era where CDNs are handling more traffic than ever, these problems are only getting worse.

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The Current State of CDN Logging

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The observability sector today resembles markets before transformative innovation: vacuum cleaners before Dyson, mobile phones before iPhone, or electric cars before Tesla. The existing solutions were designed for a completely different era – before the separation of compute and storage, before the explosion of log data volumes, and certainly before the demands of the AI era.

Consider how most logging vendors operate today:
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• Datadog charges around $2-5 per GB for log ingestion with 15-day retention. A company generating 10TB of CDN logs daily could pay upwards of $600,000 per month
• Splunk forces customers into complex licensing schemes that effectively limit how much data they can realistically log
• New Relic and other vendors offer marginally better pricing but still force unacceptable trade-offs between cost and coverage
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What's most frustrating is that these pricing models persist despite dramatic changes in the underlying technology. The separation of compute and storage has revolutionized data economics across virtually every other category of software, yet logging vendors continue to operate on business models created 15 years ago.

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Hypothetical Scenario: The Streaming Outage

To illustrate the real-world impact of incomplete CDN logging, let's consider a hypothetical but entirely plausible scenario:

A week before a major live streaming event, a streaming provider's engineering team makes a routine CDN configuration change. Under normal traffic loads, the misconfiguration goes unnoticed – cache hit ratios remain stable and performance appears normal. The change gets deployed and forgotten.
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After a week, any trace of the configuration change disappears from their logs due to their 7-day retention policy. The team, having made the economically rational decision to limit log retention to control costs, no longer has visibility into what was changed or when.

A few days before the major event, capacity planning teams review their infrastructure. Based on their available log data, they assume the current backend capacity can handle the anticipated load – after all, it worked fine during the last similar event. Unfortunately, the now "invisible" change makes that assumption dangerously wrong.

During the live event, the misconfiguration causes CDN cache efficiency to plummet under heavy load. Backend servers get hit much harder than expected, creating a cascade of performance issues. Users begin experiencing buffering and connection problems, but the operations team struggles to diagnose the root cause with their limited logging visibility.

By the time they identify the issue – tracing it back to the forgotten configuration change from a week earlier – the damage is done. Over a million viewers have abandoned the stream, social media is flooded with complaints, and the company's stock takes a hit.

In this scenario, the post-mortem would likely reveal that with complete CDN logging and longer retention, they could have:
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• Identified the time of origin of the degradation trend to when the configuration was first deployed
• Maintained visibility into the change throughout the planning period
• Quickly correlated the performance issues with the earlier configuration change during the incident

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Instead, limited logging coverage transformed a minor configuration error into a major business incident. The cost of their logging "savings"? Potentially millions in lost ad revenue and subscription cancellations.
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While this example is hypothetical, it reflects the very real challenges we've observed across the industry. Short retention periods create dangerous knowledge gaps, and incomplete logging transforms minor technical issues into major business incidents.

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The three horsemen of the logging apocalypse

Let's examine the three critical failures of traditional CDN logging solutions:
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Cost Explosion

Traditional logging vendors price their products based on data volume, charging premium rates for both ingestion and storage. This pricing model was created when storage was genuinely expensive. But in 2025, with cloud storage costs continuing to plummet, this model serves primarily to protect vendor margins.

For CDN logs, which are high-volume by nature, this creates an impossible equation. Companies are forced to choose between complete visibility and sustainable costs. When faced with estimates of $500,000+ monthly for complete CDN logging, even the most data-driven organizations are forced to compromise.
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Coverage Sacrifice

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The inevitable result of cost pressure is reduced coverage. Organizations typically:
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• Reduce coverage by ingesting only part of the data
• Limit retention to days instead of months
• Exclude high-volume CDNs or regions from logging entirely
• Drop detailed fields that would aid troubleshooting
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These compromises create dangerous blind spots. Intermittent issues, security threats that develop over time, and regional performance problems remain invisible. When an incident occurs, teams often discover they're missing exactly the data they need to diagnose and resolve it quickly.
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Complexity Creep

To compensate for coverage limitations with primary logging vendors, organizations implement a patchwork of supplementary solutions:
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• Self-hosted ELK stacks for longer-term storage (with all the maintenance overhead)
• Cloud provider-specific logging solutions (AWS CloudWatch, GCP Logging)
• Custom scripts to archive logs to object storage with rehydration workflows
• Open-source tools for log analysis and visualization
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The result is a Frankenstein's monster of logging infrastructure that no one fully understands, requires constant maintenance, and still fails to provide the comprehensive visibility organizations need.

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CDN Logging for the AI Era

These challenges are escalating as we enter the AI era:
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1. Exploding volumes: Modern applications generate more logs than ever, with microservices, containers, and edge computing all contributing to the deluge
   
2. AI-powered analysis: Machine learning and AI systems require comprehensive, long-term data to identify patterns and anomalies effectively
   
3. Agentic applications: As applications become more autonomous, they require access to complete historical data to make intelligent decisions
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The legacy business models of traditional logging vendors simply cannot accommodate these realities. They weren't designed for terabytes of daily log ingestion or years of retention. They certainly weren't designed for a world where AI agents might need to analyze months of historical CDN patterns to optimize content delivery.

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The Bronto Difference for CDN Logs

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Bronto entered the market with a mission to reinvent logging from the ground up. We recognized that incremental improvements wouldn't solve the fundamental issues plaguing CDN logging. Instead, we rebuilt the entire logging stack with a focus on three core principles:
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1. Economics Aligned with Modern Infrastructure

Bronto's architecture leverages the separation of compute and storage to deliver CDN logging at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions:
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• 90% cost reduction compared to Datadog and similar vendors
• 12-month retention by default
• No charges for search or compute resources
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This isn't just marginally better. It's a fundamentally different economic model that aligns with the realities of modern cloud infrastructure.
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2. Lightning-Fast Search Across Petabytes

Dr. David Tracey, our chief architect, developed what we call "Tracey's Law": the faster you make log search, the more valuable logging becomes to an organization.

Bronto delivers:

• Sub-second search results across terabytes of CDN logs
• Seconds-long queries across petabytes
• No need for rehydration from cold storage, ever
• Lightning-fast dashboards even on months of data
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This performance isn't just a technical achievement – it transforms how organizations interact with their CDN logs. When queries return in seconds instead of minutes (or timing out entirely), teams use logging data proactively rather than as a last resort.
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3. Single Unified Logging Layer

Bronto eliminates the "hodgepodge" of logging solutions by providing a single, comprehensive logging layer:
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• All CDN providers in one place 
• Drop-in replacement for existing solutions
• Two-line configuration change for implementation
• Automatic parsing and PII removal
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Our customers tell us that simplifying their logging infrastructure is almost as valuable as the cost savings. By eliminating the complexity of managing multiple disparate systems, teams can focus on extracting insights rather than maintaining infrastructure.

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Breaking Free from the Flywheel of Compromises

The CDN logging crisis isn't just a technical problem. It's a business problem with real implications for reliability, security, and user experience. For too long, organizations have accepted a dysfunctional status quo because there seemed to be no alternative.

Bronto is changing that. We're building the logging layer for the AI era, starting with solving the most acute pain point for many enterprises: high-volume CDN logging.

As one customer recently told us: "Every single word about the logging crisis resonates. We were spending over $400,000 monthly on CDN logging with Datadog, and still only capturing about 20% of our logs. With Bronto, we now have 100% coverage, 12-month retention, and our bill is under $40,000."

This isn't just an incremental improvement—it's a fundamental reinvention of how logging works. Just as Apple reinvented the smartphone, Dyson reinvented the vacuum cleaner, and Tesla reinvented the electric car, Bronto is reinventing logging for the modern era.

Ready to see what 100% CDN log coverage with unlimited retention looks like?

Book a demo today!



Bronto is reinventing logging from the ground up for the AI era. Our team brings 150+ years of collective logging domain expertise, with previous experience building and scaling logging platforms at IBM, Rapid7, and Logentries. This is our fourth time building a logging platform, and we're applying everything we've learned about performance, scalability, and cost optimization to deliver a revolutionary logging experience.

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