Cloudflare Radar was launched two years ago to give everyone access to the Internet trends, patterns and insights Cloudflare uses to help improve our service and protect our customers.
Until then, these types of insights were only available internally at Cloudflare. However, true to our mission of helping build a better Internet, we felt everyone should be able to look behind the curtain and see the inner workings of the Internet. It’s hard to improve or understand something when you don’t have clear visibility over how it’s working.
On Cloudflare Radar you can find timely graphs and visualizations on Internet traffic, security and attacks, protocol adoption and usage, and outages that might be affecting the Internet. All of these can be narrowed down by timeframe, country, and Autonomous System (AS). You can also find interactive deep dive reports on important subjects such as DDoS and the Meris Botnet. It’s also possible to search for any domain name to see details such as SSL usage and which countries their visitors are coming from.
Since launch, Cloudflare Radar has been used by NGOs to confirm the Internet disruptions their observers see in the field, by journalists looking for Internet trends related to an event in a country of interest or at volume of cyberattacks as retaliation to political sanctions, by analysts looking at the prevalence of new protocols and technologies, and even by brand PR departments using Cloudflare Radar data to analyze the online impact of a major sports event.
Cloudflare Radar has clearly become an important tool for many and, most importantly, we find it has helped shed light on parts of the Internet that deserve more attention and investment.
Introducing Cloudflare Radar 2.0
What has made Cloudflare Radar so valuable is that the data and insights it contains are unique and trustworthy. Cloudflare Radar shows aggregate data from across the massive spectrum of Internet traffic we see every day, presenting you with datasets you won’t find elsewhere.
However, there were still gaps. Today, on the second anniversary of Cloudflare Radar, we are launching Cloudflare Radar 2.0 in beta. It will address three common pieces of feedback from users:
Ease of finding insights and data. The way information was structured on Cloudflare Radar made finding information daunting for some people. We are redesigning Cloudflare Radar so that it becomes a breeze.
Number of insights. We know many users have wanted to see insights about other important parts of the Internet, such as email. We have also completely redesigned the Cloudflare Radar backend so that we can quickly add new insights over the coming months (including insights into email).
Sharing insights. The options for sharing Cloudflare Radar insights were limited. We will now provide you the options you want, including downloadable and embeddable graphs, sharing to social media platforms, and an API.
Finding insights and data
On a first visit to the redesigned Cloudflare Radar homepage one will notice:
Prominent and intuitive filtering capabilities on the top bar. A global search bar is also coming soon.
Content navigation on the sidebar.
Content cards showing glanceable and timely information.
The content you find on the homepage are what we call “quick bytes”. Those link you to more in-depth content for that specific topic, which can also be found through the sidebar navigation.
At the top of the page you can search for a country, autonomous system number (ASN), domain, or report to navigate to a home page for that specific content. For example, the domain page for google.com:
The navigation sidebar allows you to find more detailed insights and data related to Traffic, Security & Attacks, Adoption & Usage, and Domains. (We will be adding additional topic areas in the future.) It also gives you quick access to the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center, a tool for tracking Internet disruptions around the world and to which we are dedicating a separate blog post, and to Radar Reports, which are interactive deep dive reports on important subjects such as DDoS and the Meris Botnet.
Within these topic pages (such as the one for Adoption & Usage shown above), you will find the quick bytes for the corresponding topic at the top, and quick bytes for related topics on the right. The quick bytes on the right allow you to quickly glance at and navigate to related sections.
In the middle of the page are the more detailed charts for the topic you’re exploring.
Sharing insights
Cloudflare Radar’s reason to exist is to make Internet insights available to everyone, but historically we haven’t been as flexible as our users would want. People could download a snapshot of the graph, but not much more.
With Cloudflare Radar 2.0 we will be introducing three major new ways of using Radar insights and data:
Social share. Cloudflare Radar 2.0 charts have a more modern and clean look and feel, and soon you’ll be able to share them directly on the social media platform of your choice. No more dealing with low quality screenshots.
Embeddable charts. The beautiful charts will also be able to be embedded directly into your webpage or blog - it will work just like a widget, always showing up-to-date information.
API. If you like the data on Cloudflare Radar but want to manipulate it further for analysis, visualization, or for posting your own charts, you’ll have the Cloudflare Radar API available to you starting today.
For example, the last seven days of HTTP traffic data for Portugal can be obtained from https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/radar/http/timeseries/device_type?dateRange=7d&location=PT
Note: The API is available today. To use the Cloudflare API you need an API token or key (more details here). Embedding charts and sharing directly to social are new features to be released later this year.
Technology changes
Cloudflare Radar 2.0 was built on a new technology stack; we will write a blog post about why and how we did it soon. A lot changed: we now have proper GraphQL data endpoints and a public API, the website runs on top of Cloudflare Pages and Workers, and we're finally doing server-side rendering using Remix. We adopted SVG whenever possible, built our reusable data visualization components system, and are using Cosmos for visual TDD. These foundational changes will provide a better UX/UI to our users and give us speed when iterating and improving Cloudflare Radar in the future.
We hope you find this update valuable, and recommend you keep an eye on radar.cloudflare.com to see the new insights and topics we’ll be adding regularly. If you have any feedback, please send it to us through the Cloudflare Community.