Count concurrent users

VideoTaxi wrote:
Is there any way to count concurrent WATCHING (streaming) users by MediaPackage, MediaLive or CloudFront? Yes, Lambda@Edge+Cloudfront would be a solution for a self created measurement tool ... but is there no way to count concurrent users?

Hi VideoTaxi,
The dimensions you mention measure different things.
An end user on your stream (ie: someone who is playing back a URL that ends at CloudFront) can only be measured from CloudFront data. CloudFront is the only place where you would be able to get data around how many people are WATCHING your stream.

Only some of the hits you get on CloudFront will pass through to MediaPackage. Others will be served content from CloudFront cache and therefor will not register with MediaPackage. MediaPackage exposes the hits it receives to CloudWatch. You can read more about which metrics are published here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/mediapackage/latest/ug/metrics.html. The metric you are looking for is called "EgressRequestCount". Note that those are only the requests that aren't being served by CloudFront directly.

MediaLive has no concept of "players connected to your stream". Since MediaLive only encodes and "pushes" content out.

I hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any further questions!

Kind Regards,
Thijs

Hi Thijs,
thanks for your helpful answer. So you are suggesting tracking infos directly in CloudFront and do that over the logs (not really real-time) or the Lambda@Edge functions (real-time), correct?
Thanks so much, Andreas

Hi Andreas,

Yes, you should either parse the logs that cloudfront can provide you. Like you said, this would not be real-time. The alternative is to run a lambda@edge every time a request comes by to log whichever details you are most interested in.

I hope this helps! Please reach out if there are any followup questions you might have!

Kind regards,
Thijs

Thanks for helping out!