Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring

AWS CloudFront
Monitoring

Cache Hit Ratios, Error Rates & CDN Bandwidth

Ensure your content is delivered globally at lightning speed. BigBell monitors AWS CloudFront to track cache efficiency, bandwidth costs, and origin server errors.

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Overview

What is AWS CloudFront Monitoring?

AWS CloudFront monitoring involves tracking the performance of Amazon's Content Delivery Network (CDN). It tracks how much data is being served from edge locations (BytesDownloaded), the percentage of requests successfully served from cache versus requests sent back to the origin server (Cache Hit Ratio), and the rate of HTTP errors (4xx and 5xx) occurring at the edge.

Why AWS CloudFront Monitoring Matters

A CDN is supposed to speed up your website and reduce load on your backend servers. However, a misconfigured cache behavior can result in a 0% Cache Hit Ratio, meaning CloudFront sends every single request to your origin server, resulting in slow page loads and a massive AWS bill. Monitoring CloudFront ensures your caching strategy is actually working, and alerts you if your origin server (like an Application Load Balancer or S3 bucket) starts returning 500 errors to the edge.

✓Optimize CDN configurations by tracking Cache Hit Ratios
✓Detect origin server failures via CloudFront 5xx error spikes
✓Monitor outbound bandwidth to predict AWS CDN costs
✓Ensure global users aren't experiencing localized edge errors

Core Use Cases

Essential for media companies streaming video via CloudFront, high-traffic e-commerce sites relying on cached assets to survive traffic spikes, and frontend teams deploying React/Angular apps via S3 and CloudFront.

Features

Complete CloudFront Monitoring Capabilities

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Cache Hit Tracking

Monitor the exact percentage of requests served directly from the CDN edge versus those routed to the origin.

⚠️

Error Rate Monitoring

Track 4xx (client) and 5xx (server) error rates occurring at the CDN level to detect broken links or backend crashes.

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Bytes Downloaded

Keep an eye on total data egress from CloudFront to avoid end-of-month billing surprises.

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Origin Health Alerts

Set alerts to trigger if the 5xxErrorRate spikes, indicating that CloudFront cannot communicate with your backend server.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

For static assets (images, CSS, JS), you should aim for a Cache Hit Ratio of 90% or higher. For dynamic APIs routed through CloudFront, the ratio will naturally be much lower.

A 502 error usually means CloudFront tried to pull content from your origin server (like an EC2 instance or ALB), but the origin server was offline, overloaded, or returned an invalid response.

Yes, you can track the execution metrics and error rates of Lambda@Edge functions associated with your CloudFront distributions.

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