Amazon CloudFront Data Transfer Per User

Question

A customer is looking to get a report with usage information (data transfer) on their contents that are getting delivered from a single Amazon CloudFront Distribution. They have production systems which are used by multiple institutions and are looking to get a report on data transfer from CloudFront for each institution.

Accepted Answer

If its not practical to give each user their own distribution, the option would be to analyse the [CloudFront access logs][1] to calculate the data delivered to each user. You would need something to filter on user - could be a specific URI portion, but most likely an identifying cookie. The log field sc-bytes provides the amount of data delivered from CloudFront to the user for the HTTP response which won't include all the data delivered (for example, it won't include the TLS negotiation data), would be close to it.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/AccessLogs.html#LogFileFormat

Answer

Hi! In order to calculate the data transfer cost associated with CloudFront, there are two steps that need to happen.

1. Enable CloudFront access logs as a way to gather and record the associated traffic which is linear to the data transfer cost
2. Next, based on the service being used, query the logs to find the total associated cost with data transfer. For example, if we are using S3, an appropriate service that can be used would be Amazon Athena

Hope this helps!

Amazon CloudFront Data Transfer Per User

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