Amazon CloudFront now supports Common Media Client Data (CMCD) fields in real-time logs

Starting today, you can enable Common Media Client Data (CMCD) fields in your CloudFront real-time logs. You can select key client-side performance parameters and CloudFront delivery performance parameters in the same log record. This can help you correlate variations in Quality of Experience (QoE) for your viewers to CloudFront performance at the granularity of single viewer sessions, simplifying the troubleshooting of QoE issues that impact your viewers engagement.

CMCD is a standardized way for transmitting client-side performance data from your media player. The CMCD specification outlines a set of key-value pairs like bitrate, buffer length, object playback duration, measured throughput, and other key values that provide insight into the media player performance. Your media player can use the CMCD standard and send the performance parameters in the HTTP request headers or query string to CloudFront.

Previously, CloudFront logged CMCD parameters as part of the full query string log field, or the HTTP headers log field. Now, you can simply select to include specific CMCD parameters in your real-time logs and save on compute needed to search and extract the CMCD key-value pairs, and reduce the data set for your log analysis.

To enable CMCD in your CloudFront real-time logs, follow the developer guide. To learn more about using CMCD in a custom observability dashboard, refer to the Improving video observability with CMCD and CloudFront Blog. The real-time logs are charged based on the number of log lines that CloudFront publishes to your log destination, to learn more, visit the CloudFront pricing page.