Today we’re excited to be announcing more flexibility to HTTP alerting, enabling customers to customize the types of activity they’re alerted on and how those alerts are organized.
Prior to today, HTTP alerts at Cloudflare have been very generic. You could choose which Internet properties you wanted and what sensitivity you wanted to be alerted on, but you couldn’t choose anything else. You couldn’t, for example, exclude the IP addresses you use to test things. You couldn’t choose to monitor only a specific path. You couldn’t choose which HTTP statuses you wanted to be alerted on. You couldn’t even choose to monitor your entire account instead of specific zones.
Our customers leverage the Cloudflare network for a myriad of use cases ranging from decreasing bandwidth costs and accelerating asset delivery with Cloudflare CDN to protecting their applications against brute force attacks with Cloudflare Bot Management. Whether the reasons for routing traffic through the Cloudflare network are simple or complex, one powerful capability that comes for free is observability.
With traffic flowing through the network, we can monitor and alert customers about anomalous events such as spikes in origin error rates, enabling them to investigate further and mitigate any issues as necessary. But to date, our HTTP alerting capabilities have been too simple, offering only a narrow set of options for filtering alongside predefined service level objective (SLO) targets. By exposing more of the metadata already available with each request as filtering options, customers can create more sophisticated monitoring schemes to answer important questions about their traffic.
Which HTTP errors are crossing my SLO threshold? Is the sudden spike in traffic caused by my own internal testing? These questions and more can be answered with the new advanced HTTP alerts.
Alerts can be filtered and organized based on the values of the following properties: origin response status codes, edge response status codes, alert sensitivity/SLO, client IPv4/IPv6 addresses, and specific zones.
The new notifications are available to all Enterprise customers today and can be created and managed by anyone with account-level privileges.
How to get started
To get started setting up an advanced HTTP alert, navigate to your account’s notification management and select the Advanced HTTP Alert type.
Next, name your new notification and select how you want notifications to be delivered and to whom.
Lastly, select the domains for which this notification should be sent and configure the desired filters, groupings, and SLO.
Monitoring and alerting are critical practices in effectively managing an application or website, and today we’re excited to make it easier to do with Cloudflare.
If you’re not already an Enterprise customer and would like to take advantage of the new advanced HTTP alerts, get in touch.