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.
