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Website Backup & Recovery

6 posts · Dec 2019 – Mar 2022

What this trail covers

Cloudflare's offerings have expanded to encompass website backup and recovery solutions, including tools and services that enable website owners to safeguard their digital assets. This has evolved to include passive origin monitoring, which proactively notifies customers when their origin servers are down, allowing them to take action to restore their sites and reduce the impact of downtime. Health Checks provide active monitoring with configurable checks and analytics. Health Check Analytics provide detailed insights into change events and unhealthy origins. Zero-Downtime Failover automatically retries requests to origin servers when initial connection attempts fail, improving availability by seamlessly switching to alternate origins within the same HTTP request or Load Balancing pool. Standalone Health Checks allow for origin monitoring without a Cloudflare Load Balancer, with configurable checks and analytics. Passive Origin Monitoring sends email alerts when origin downtime is detected for more than a few minutes. The Notification Center serves as a central hub for managing these notifications.

All Cloudflare trails
  1. Get updates on the health of your origin where you need themThis post introduces the integration of Health Checks with Cloudflare's Notifications tab, enabling users to receive critical alerts on origin health via webhooks, Slack, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, SIEM platforms, and PagerDuty. It also details how to create a custom origin health status page using Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects by leveraging webhook notifications. The post provides step-by-step instructions for setting up Health Checks, configuring webhooks, and writing worker logic for status updates and display.
  2. Smart(er) Origin Service Level MonitoringIntroduced Origin Error Rate notifications for Enterprise customers, which go beyond simple downtime alerts. This new feature uses Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and burn rate calculations to detect anomalies in 5xx error rates from origin servers. It employs both short-term and long-term indicators to balance quick detection of critical issues with the avoidance of false positives. Users can configure SLO sensitivity (99.9%, 99.8%, 99.7%) and select specific domains for monitoring.
  3. Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin ErrorsThis post announces a partnership between Cloudflare's Always Online service and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The integration allows Always Online to serve archived copies of webpages from the Internet Archive when a customer's origin server is unreachable. This enhances website resilience by providing content to visitors even during origin downtime. The partnership also helps the Internet Archive expand its web archiving efforts by discovering and archiving websites that might otherwise be missed. The mechanism involves Cloudflare edge servers checking local cache first, then querying the Internet Archive if content is unavailable, and serving archived content with a banner indicating origin issues.
  4. Health Check Analytics and how you can use itIntroduced Health Check Analytics to provide detailed logs and data visualizations for Standalone Health Checks. This includes error breakdowns, waterfall views of request timing (TCP connection, TLS handshake, Time to First Byte), and regional performance comparisons. Health checks are run from multiple locations within selected regions to ensure representative reporting.
  5. Helping sites get back online: the origin monitoring intern projectThis post details the development of a passive origin monitoring feature, which notifies customers when their origin servers are unreachable. The project involved analyzing large datasets of request errors, developing algorithms to minimize false positives/negatives for low-traffic sites, and designing actionable notifications for a diverse customer base. The feature was iterated upon based on customer feedback and is now available on all Cloudflare plans.
  7. New tools to monitor your server and avoid downtimeIntroduced Standalone Health Checks for origin server monitoring with configurable checks and analytics, available on Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. Launched Passive Origin Monitoring to automatically notify users via email when origin downtime is detected, available on all plans. Introduced Zero-Downtime Failover, which automatically retries requests to alternate origin servers within the same HTTP request or Load Balancing pool upon connection failure, becoming the default behavior for Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. Announced the upcoming Notification Center for managing all notifications.