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Traffic Flow Visualization

1 post · Oct 2021 – Sep 2023

What this trail covers

Cloudflare's Traffic Sequence illustration has evolved into Cloudflare Trace, a comprehensive tool for understanding HTTP request traversal through the Cloudflare ecosystem. Trace provides detailed visualizations of applied rules and product interactions, enabling users to debug issues, validate security rules, and reduce support workload. It offers both a UI-based visualization and a programmatic JSON output for deeper analysis. Future enhancements include scheduling and alerts.

All Cloudflare trails
  1. Traffic transparency: unleashing the power of Cloudflare TraceIntroduced Cloudflare Trace, a new product that provides detailed visualizations of HTTP request traversal through Cloudflare's product stack. This includes showing which rules and products were matched, and the specific actions taken. It offers a UI-based trace visualization and a programmatic JSON output, building upon the internal Flute tool and addressing customer requests for greater transparency in debugging and understanding rule interactions. The feature aims to reduce support load by empowering customers to self-serve.
  2. Traffic Sequence: Which Product Runs First?This post introduces Traffic Sequence, a dashboard illustration that provides a default, high-level overview of how Cloudflare products interact within the HTTP request lifecycle. It aims to simplify the complex ecosystem for customers and internal teams by showing the order in which products are applied, enabling better understanding of configuration impacts and product discoverability. The feature is now enabled by default for all zones and appears on ten product pages within the dashboard. Future aspirations include a more detailed, traceroute-like feature for exact traffic path analysis.