Explaining Cloudflare's ABR Analytics

Cloudflare has introduced Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) to improve the quality and responsiveness of its analytics products. ABR allows for multiple resolutions of data, enabling faster ad hoc queries on reduced resolution tables while maintaining consistent response times and a better user experience. The technique is used with ClickHouse, a columnar store that stores and processes analytics data, covering seven orders of magnitude from 100% to 0.0001% of the original events. ABR also facilitates aggregations by making compact estimates of every dimension and supports other complex forms of aggregations such as "topK" and "count-distinct". The technology improves resilience and scalability, allowing for queries even under high tail latency or system failures. In the coming months, Cloudflare plans to release new dashboards and analytics products based on ABR.