Monitoring CDN Cache Hit Miss Ratio

In today’s Tip of the Day, we are looking at validating the performance of your CDN cache vs. the CDN origin content. Having this information at your fingertips will allow you to verify that (i) your CDN service is improving performance for your end users; and (ii) they are adhering to your SLAs.

Your CDN Monitoring solution needs to offer a comprehensive set of insights into regional performance problems, network routing challenges, and other overall performance issues, including origin vs. edge. This will give you the detailed data necessary to share with your CDN provider to resolve issues as quickly as possible and back up your claim if you are not receiving the level of service promised.

Don’t miss our next webinar on CDN monitoring featuring speakers from eBay, Walmart, and Catchpoint this Thursday at 2 PM EDT

Monitoring CDN Performance at a Granular Level

CDNs have sophisticated infrastructures. In most request-response cycles, a hefty amount of time is spent within the CDN infrastructure. The use of cache-hierarchies and optimized routing between a CDN’s own PoP leads to increased complexity and potential latency issues.

Monitoring CDN cache vs. origin at a granular level allows you to see how every aspect of the CDN infrastructure has an impact on the delivery of its content. This is a critical part of any CDN monitoring strategy.

Leverage Catchpoint’s Comprehensive Dashboard to Understand CDN Hit or Miss

One way that CDNs provide higher availability when compared to an origin infrastructure is to serve cached content when the origin is unreachable or unavailable. When a browser requests a piece of content that has been cached by the CDN, it will deliver that content. This is known as a cache hit. A [cache miss](https://www.techopedia.com/definition/6308/cache-miss#:~:text=Cache miss is a state,levels or the main memory.) is when the content is unavailable on the cache server or servers and the CDN has to make a request back to the origin server.

Long-term caching strategies should mean that the CDN has more cache hits than misses and the need to reach the origin is reduced. By leveraging a sophisticated CDN Monitoring solution, you can ensure that the CDN cache is showing better performance, availability and reachability and enforce SLAs if it is not.

Catchpoint offers a highly detailed view of CDN cache vs. CDN origin, for instance, in the view below, you can see exactly how cache hits and cache misses measure against one another in terms of latency.

You can also see how Catchpoint allows you to compare the origin vs. cache KPIs per city (image below). You can use a number of metrics to compare performance, including average ping round trip times, average response, average connect, and so on.

In today’s video, you will:

Learn why getting a picture of the performance of your CDN cached vs. CDN origin content is important in verifying the performance of your CDN vendor and ensuring SLAs are met;
Receive a detailed walkthrough of Catchpoint’s dashboard, seeing how to compare CDN cache vs. CDN origin at a highly granular level;
Ascertain how to use Catchpoint’s powerful visualizations, such as geo heat maps to quickly identify issues visually;
See how to group and isolate results by geographic data e.g. by city, ISP, country, continent, etc.
Understand the unparalleled nature of Catchpoint’s worldwide coverage with the largest, most diverse, and most distributed infrastructure in the world.

With Catchpoint, you can target key features and deliverables of your CDN service, such as CDN cache hit or miss, and monitor those chosen aspects proactively. This allows you to reduce the time to detect any problems and dramatically improve mean time to resolution (MTTR) all the way from the evaluation phase through to deployment. And also ensure that content is being delivered efficiently and SLAs are being met.