Case Study: Cox Communications achieves scalable, high-performance CDN logging and real-time analytics with Elastic

Cox - Customer Case Study

Cox Communications, a broadband and entertainment provider, ran a large CDN built on Apache Traffic Control and Traffic Server to deliver high‑volume streams (including full Olympic coverage) to all devices. Rapid growth in CDN usage — more video, images and program guides — caused their logging platform to slow, cut retention, filter events and become prohibitively expensive, leaving the team with reduced visibility into cache health and delivery performance.

They proved and rolled out an Elasticsearch‑based pipeline (Filebeat → Kafka → Logstash → Elasticsearch) deployed with Ansible and Docker, moved to a hot/warm node architecture (tmpfs RAM for hot indexing and NVMe/SSDs for warm storage), switched to JSON logs and used hourly indices with Curator. These changes increased indexing throughput, restored retention and real‑time visibility, and enabled rich dashboards (bandwidth, errors, video quality, cache health) to monitor hundreds of Gbps of traffic and support large streaming events.

Cox

Steve Malenfant

Principal Engineer