Learn how to actively monitor your origin server with Cloudflare Health Checks
Overview
A health check actively monitors whether your origin server is online by sending specific requests at regular intervals.
Cloudflare offers two types of health checks:
- Standalone health checks (included with all paid plans)
- Load Balancing health checks (included as part of a Load Balancing subscription)
Set up health checks
Standalone health checks
To create a standalone health check:
1. Navigate to Traffic > Health Checks.
2. Click Create.
3. Fill out the form, paying special attention to:
- The values for Interval and Check regions, because decreasing the Interval and increasing Check regions may increase the load on your origin server
- Notifications, which can alert you to when your origin changes status
- Health change thresholds, which specify the number of consecutive passed or failed checks before an origin changes status
4. Click Save and Deploy.
Once you create a health check, you can monitor origin status using Health Check Analytics.
Load Balancing health checks
For instructions on setting up a load balancing health check, see the developer documentation.
Use health check analytics
Once you have set up a standalone health check — likely including notification emails — use health check analytics to debug possible origin issues.
To access health check analytics, go to Traffic > Health Check Analytics. Once there, you can evaluate origin uptime and latency and specific event logs:
- Health Checks By Uptime: Shows the % of uptime for individual origins over time.
- Health Checks By Failure Reason: Shows a breakdown of failures by the specific reason.
- Health Checks By Latency: Shows average latency – measured in round trip time — for individual origins over time.
- Event Log: Shows individual health check data. Click each record for additional details on Round trip time, the Failure Reason, the Average Waterfall (showing chronological data about request stages), and more.
Related resources
- Introductory blog post
- Health Check Analytics (blog post)
- Load balancing (developer documentation)