Use Amazon CloudFront? Get Your Logs into Loggly

There are many applications where a content delivery network (CDN) is a must-have for delivering a good user experience. If you need a CDN and run your application on AWS, you’ll probably want to give Amazon CloudFront a serious look.

Fortunately, there is a logging library and documentation to make it easy for you to bring CloudFront logs into Loggly for analysis. I’d like to give a shout-out to Grosan Flaviu Gheorghe for authoring the Amazon CloudFront library for the Loggly community and to Mav Peri of Quidco for contributing to the project. Amazing work!

CloudFront Access Logs Contain Valuable Application Intelligence

When you deploy a CDN like CloudFront, user requests that used to go directly to your servers now terminate at the CDN. As a result, you could be missing out on critical intelligence unless you aggregate your CDN logs. Your CloudFront access logs give you a lot of details about the nature of content requests. To see how you might use this information, check out a recent joint AWS-Loggly case study on Citymaps. Bob Matsuoka, the CTO at Citymaps, shared how his team uses CloudFront logs to track partner usage of its APIs and properly attribute traffic to its service.

You can learn more about CloudFront logs in the Amazon documentation.

The new logging library for sending CloudFront logs to Loggly uses an AWS Lambda script. We like Lambda because it doesn’t require you to maintain any infrastructure, and you can get up and running in a couple minutes.

Loggly also has a Lambda-based library for /amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) logs; you can learn more about how Lambda works from a blog post that our customer Chris Boscolo wrote about the ELB library.

CloudFront logging is one more reason to get started with Loggly if you haven’t done so already. It just takes a few minutes to set up a free trial and check it out!

The Loggly and SolarWinds trademarks, service marks, and logos are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC or its affiliates. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.