Cloudinary Blog

How to analyze image delivery issues

Using error reports to identify image delivery issues

If you have a web site or mobile application, chances are you need to deliver a lot of media resources, especially images, to your users. How would you know if all your images were delivered correctly to your users and if there were no broken images displayed on your website? Maybe you build image URLs based on a certain naming convention and you end up with URLs that point to non-existing images, which result in HTTP status errors and broken images? Maybe search engines like Google have indexed the URLs of your images that were subsequently deleted or modified, and these URLs now generate errors when accessed?

If you use Cloudinary, then the image URLs also include manipulation and transformation instructions, and so your dynamic code might build invalid URLs (e.g., invalid width, height, etc.) which might result in HTTP 400 errors.

Without a means to identify resource delivery issues you probably don't know exactly what's happening in your system and with your image delivery. Site analytic tools (such as Google Analytics) can't help find these issues and they might get lost in the noise.

Cloudinary's image delivery error reporting

To help you identify any image delivery problems, Cloudinary has added an error reporting mechanism. All the requests made to your Cloudinary account via delivery URLs or API calls are processed and any errors generated are displayed in an interactive web page in Cloudinary's Management Console. The error reports can be accessed by clicking the Error report link on the Reports & Insights page in the Management Console.

The Error Report page lists all the resource delivery errors for the current date (by default), and the number of errors are listed according to the type of error encountered. A graph next to the list of errors visually displays the frequency of each type of error over the last month, and you can retrieve the total number of errors for a specific date by selecting the date from the dropdown box above the graph or by clicking a specific point on the graph itself.

Error Report

The possible errors reported include:

  • 400 Bad Request - The server cannot process the request due to something that is perceived to be a request error, e.g., malformed request syntax, invalid image transformation parameters.
  • 401 Unauthorized - Authentication is required and has failed or has not been provided, e.g., the URL should be signed when using add-ons or for certain transformations in Strict Transformations mode, or the image type was restricted in your account's security settings.
  • 404 Not Found - The requested resource could not be found, e.g., the public_id is invalid.
  • 408 Request Timeout - The server timed out waiting for the request, e.g., due to a networking error or a slow client.
  • 420 Rate limited - While Cloudinary's plan limits are soft limits, there were either too many concurrent requests for images or the hard quota for add-on usage for your account was exceeded.
  • 200 Fallback image on error - A default image placeholder was delivered as the requested image was not found.

Selecting one of the error categories will display a list of errors encountered within that category and the details associated with that error: the reason for the error, the URI of the requested image and the referral web site (who is requesting the resource).

400 - Bad request

The information contained in the error report is useful for pointing out issues with image delivery, and is displayed in real time with a slight delay of up to 5 minutes. Besides the report's usefulness in identifying and fixing issues with resource delivery on an ongoing basis, the report is especially useful when first integrating with Cloudinary and launching your site or application in production (or launching an updated version thereof), and checking for any issues. Any issues involving the correct building of image URLs, or inadvertently breaking any image deliveries, can be identified, debugged and fixed without waiting for complaints from your users.

Summary

The error reporting feature gives you useful information and insight about your image and video delivery, and specific analysis of any errors when delivering your media. The report allows you to locate the problems, debug and analyze the issues and then fix them, and is especially useful when integrating with a new cloud-service like Cloudinary or when launching a new version of your application or website. The error report feature is available for Cloudinary's customers with the Advanced plan or higher.

Recent Blog Posts

Generate Waveform Images from Audio with Cloudinary

This is a reposting of an article written by David Walsh. Check out his blog HERE!
I've been working a lot with visualizations lately, which is a far cry from your normal webpage element interaction coding; you need advanced geometry knowledge, render and performance knowledge, and much more. It's been a great learning experience but it can be challenging and isn't always an interest of all web developers. That's why we use apps and services specializing in complex tasks like Cloudinary: we need it done quickly and by a tool written by an expert.

Read more
Make All Images on Your Website Responsive in 3 Easy Steps

Images are crucial to website performance, but most still don't implement responsive images. It’s not just about fitting an image on the screen, but also making the the image size relatively rational to the device. The srcset and sizes options, which are your best hit are hard to implement. Cloudinary provides an easier way, which we will discuss in this article.

Read more

The Future of Audio and Video on the Web

By Prosper Otemuyiwa
The Future of Audio and Video on the Web

Web sites and platforms are becoming increasingly media-rich. Today, approximately 62 percent of internet traffic is made up of images, with audio and video constituting a growing percentage of the bytes.

Read more

Embed Images in Email Campaigns at Scale

By Sourav Kundu
Embed Images in Email Campaigns at Scale

tl;dr

Cloudinary is a powerful image hosting solution for email marketing campaigns of any size. With features such as advanced image optimization and on-the-fly image transformation, backed by a global CDN, Cloudinary provides the base for a seamless user experience in your email campaigns leading to increased conversion and performance.

Read more
Build the Back-End For Your Own Instagram-style App with Cloudinary

Github Repo

Managing media files (processing, storage and manipulation) is one of the biggest challenges we encounter as practical developers. These challenges include:

A great service called Cloudinary can help us overcome many of these challenges. Together with Cloudinary, let's work on solutions to these challenges and hopefully have a simpler mental model towards media management.

Read more

Build A Miniflix in 10 Minutes

By Prosper Otemuyiwa
Build A Miniflix in 10 Minutes

Developers are constantly faced with challenges of building complex products every single day. And there are constraints on the time needed to build out the features of these products.

Engineering and Product managers want to beat deadlines for projects daily. CEOs want to roll out new products as fast as possible. Entrepreneurs need their MVPs like yesterday. With this in mind, what should developers do?

Read more