Can I monitor Cloudflare sites?
Yes, Cloudflare sites work out of the box. There are a few things worth knowing though, especially if you want real visibility into your origin server and not just the Cloudflare edge.
If your WAF is blocking us #
Our monitoring IPs are fixed and published. You can whitelist them (and our user agent) in a few clicks. We have a step-by-step guide for Cloudflare specifically:
Our crawler also identifies itself with a clear user agent, which makes rule-writing straightforward.
Note: if Cloudflare is proxying traffic to your origin (the typical setup), your origin's access logs will show Cloudflare's IPs, not ours. That's a Cloudflare-side thing, not an Oh Dear thing.
Monitor Cloudflare and your origin #
It's a good idea to monitor your site twice:
- Through Cloudflare, the way your visitors reach it.
- Directly against your origin, using a secret query string or custom header that Cloudflare is configured to always forward (no caching).
That way, you'll catch the scenarios where Cloudflare is happily serving a cached response while your backend is down. More detail in our guide on how to monitor the origin server.
A handy side effect: a warmer cache #
Our broken links crawler visits every page on your site at least once a day. If you sit behind Cloudflare or Varnish, that's a free side effect: every page gets touched, which keeps your cache primed and fresh for real visitors. A nice little bonus on top of the broken link check itself.
