When requests pass through the Cloudflare network, we capture many data points associated with HTTP traffic, encryption, security, DNS, and Workers. The resulting metrics appear in analytics products, including our dashboard UI and APIs.
About the Cloudflare Analytics product line
In an effort to make analytics a ubiquitous component of all our products, Cloudflare has implemented, and continues to evolve, several ways in which customers can access and gain insights from Internet properties on Cloudflare.
The offerings below encompass the current set of Cloudflare Analytics products. Click each link to learn more.
- [Coming soon!] Cloudflare Account Analytics (beta) - Displays aggregated metrics for all sites in your account.
- Cloudflare Site Analytics - Features an extensive set of reports for a specific site in your account.
- Product Analytics:
- Cloudflare Firewall Analytics - Highlights attack and mitigation metrics detected by the Cloudflare Firewall.
- Load Balancing Analytics - Features metrics to help gain insights into traffic load balancer steering decisions.
- The Cloudflare Analytics GraphQL API - Empowers customers to access and manipulate site and account level data directly. This API replaces and expands onthe previous Zone Analytics API.
Understand how Cloudflare captures and processes Analytics data
The underlying datasets that Cloudflare Analytics captures and processes share the following characteristics:
- All metrics reflect traffic proxied (orange-clouded) through the Cloudflare network, as configured via DNS records in the Cloudflare DNS app. Note that for a CNAME Setup, Cloudflare is unable to offer DNS metrics.
- Cloudflare does not count traffic for unproxied DNS records. However, if your site is not proxied through Cloudflare but Cloudflare is your authoritative DNS server, then we are able to collect DNS metrics.
- Cloudflare can only proxy information for traffic traveling over specific ports.
- In determining the originating country, Cloudflare uses the IP address associated with each request. Learn about Configuring Cloudflare IP Geolocation.
Understand apparent data discrepancies
In addition to the characteristics described above, it’s possible that your Cloudflare metrics do not fully align with data for the same site as reported by other sources such as Google Analytics and web server logs.
Once Cloudflare identifies a unique IP address for a request, we identify such request as a visit. Therefore, the number of visitors Cloudflare Analytics shows is probably higher than what other analytics services may report.
For example, Google Analytics and other web-based analytics programs use JavaScript on the web browser to track visitors. As a result, Google Analytics doesn’t record threats, bots, and automated crawlers because those requests typically do not trigger JavaScript. Also, these services do not track visitors who disable JavaScript on their browser or who leave a page before it fully loads.
Finally, it’s likely that unique visitor data from the Cloudflare Analytics app is greater than your search analytics unique pageviews. This is because pageviews reflect when someone visits a page via a web browser and loads the entire page. However, when another site or service like a bot, plugin, or API is consuming partial content from your site (but not loading a full page), this counts as a unique visitor in Cloudflare and not as a pageview.
About missing metrics
You may not be seeing metrics your Cloudflare Analytics for the following reasons:
- You only recently signed up for Cloudflare. Metrics are delayed 24 hours for domains on a free Cloudflare plan.
- If you signed up directly with Cloudflare, your nameservers might not be pointing to Cloudflare at your registrar just yet (registrars can take 24-72 hours to change the nameservers to ours). Metrics will not start gathering until we detect the nameservers pointing to Cloudflare.
- If you signed up through a Cloudflare hosting partner option, something might not configured correctly. Contact the hosting partner for support.
- Some browser extensions designed to block ads may prevent analytics from loading. Disabling the extension or whitelisting Cloudflare.com should remove this possibility.
Note that activations through a hosting partner works via a CNAME Setup on the www record. If most of your traffic actually goes to domain.com, forward your traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com.