Tracking pixel solution at the edge on AWS

This solution builds an edge solution using Amazon CloudFront with real-time logs. When a HTTP request is made to serve a 1x1 transparent pixel HTML <img> tag, fields are logged such as c-ip, timestamp, cs-uri-query, etc.. Real-time logs integrates with Kinesis Data Streams which is then delivered to Kinesis Data Firehose to store in S3 for future processing.

Solution Architecture

Requirements

• AWS CDK 2.93.x
• Configured AWS credentials

Deploy on AWS

1. Clone git repository and navigate to CDK project

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-cloudfront-pixel-tracking.git
cd amazon-cloudfront-pixel-tracking

2. Install CDK

npm install

3. Run CDK commands to bootstrap, synthesize, and deploy the CDK stack

cdk bootstrap
cdk synth
cdk deploy

4. After deploying, CDK will give you the new CloudFront distribution. Update webpage/index.html with the newly created CloudFront distribution. You can save and deploy with CDK or go directly to S3 and make the changes via the console.

How to use

CloudFront real-time logs are configurable and require specifying the fields to log. This example is set up to log the following fields:

• timestamp: The date and time at which the edge server finished responding to the request.
• c-ip: The IP address of the viewer that made the request.
• cs-uri-query: The query string portion of the request URL which is how we can collect other information.

Once customized, you can directly begin tracking interactions from web pages or emails from an HTML IMG tag, or from any other event producer you might consider by generating HTTP-GET requests to the URL of the template output. As an example, this would be an HTTP call for the example implementation:

curl -G -d 'userid=aws_user' -d 'thirdpartyname=example.hightrafficwebsite.com' https://<your template output domain>/1x1.png

Testing CDK constructs

npm run test

Cleanup

In the amazon-cloudfront-pixel-tracking subdirectory of the cloned repository, delete the deployed resources:

cdk destroy

Please be aware that some resources aren't automatically deleted and either need a retention policy that allows deletes or you need to delete them manually in you AWS account.

Security

See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

License

This sample code is licensed under the MIT-0 License. See the LICENSE file.