Get CloudFront PopularObjects programmatically

As the bot wrote, the dashboard views in the console are only available via the console. You can calculate the equivalent data programmatically from CloudFront standard logs, which you mentioned having enabled. I believe that's also what CloudFront does internally to produce the console views, even if it might precalculate and consolidate data on the fly for quicker analysis. Athena is able to process huge amounts of data, although I don't know how immense your volumes are.

I appreciate this might not be useful to you, since you mentioned preferring to avoid analysing logs, but since this can all be done rather easily with standard AWS services, it might still be useful to others later.

First, Athena needs to be set up to analyse the logs. Before using Athena for the first time, you should create a dedicated S3 bucket for Athena's query results in the same region where you created the S3 bucket for the CloudFront logs. You should also run Athena in the same region for the best performance and lowest costs.

When the result bucket is created, open the Athena console, and in the Query editor, enter the result bucket's name and optional prefix (subfolder) on the Settings tab in "Query result location".

Next, in the Query editor, create a new database for the logs (for example: create database cloudfront_logs) or choose an existing database. Create a table for the CloudFront logs as per the instructions in this documentation article: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/create-cloudfront-table-standard-logs.html. You'll need to replace the S3 location in the documentation example with the name of your log bucket and the prefix under which the logs for the distribution you want are sent.

If you'd like, you can also use Athena's partition projection feature to use a single table conveniently for multiple distributions, but that isn't strictly necessary, because you can also just create a separate table for each distribution.

Once the table is created, it's useful to test that it works with a simple SQL query in Athena, such as:

select * from cloudfront_standard_logs limit 100

Finally, you can have Athena calculate similar data as that shown by the Popular pages console view with the SQL query below. It's set to read logs for the past 30 days, so adjust to your liking:

select
    cs_uri_stem as "Object",
    count(*) as Requests,
    count(case when x_edge_response_result_type='Hit' then 1 end) as Hits,
    cast(
        round(
            cast(count(case when x_edge_response_result_type in ('Hit','RefreshHit') then 1 end) as decimal(18, 6))
                / cast(count(*) as decimal(18, 6))
                * cast(100 as decimal(18, 6)),
            2
        ) as decimal(18, 2)
    ) as HitsPct,
    count(case when x_edge_response_result_type='Miss' then 1 end) as Misses,
    sum(case when x_edge_response_result_type='Miss' then sc_bytes end) as BytesFromMisses,
    sum(sc_bytes) as TotalBytes,
    count(
        case when
            (sc_status=200 and x_edge_result_type='Error')
            or (x_edge_response_result_type!='Error' and x_edge_result_type='Error')
        then 1 end
    ) as IncompleteDownloads,
    count(case when sc_status between 200 and 299 then 1 end) as "2xx",
    count(case when sc_status between 300 and 399 then 1 end) as "3xx",
    count(case when sc_status between 400 and 499 then 1 end) as "4xx",  
    count(case when sc_status between 500 and 599 then 1 end) as "5xx"
from cloudfront_standard_logs
where
    x_edge_result_type!='Redirect'
    and date>=date_add('day', -30, now())
group by cs_uri_stem
order by Requests desc, "Object" asc

Athena stores its query results in the result bucket you specified, which you can ingest with your custom program and optionally cache them to reduce the need to scan the logs repeatedly. You can also call Athena programmatically to execute the query.