Cloudflare

A community that’s creating a better web

CloudFlare is building a better Internet, and leveraging the power of community to do so. If any site on their service is attacked, CloudFlare learns from it and immediately protects all other users from similar attacks. With each new site, CloudFlare is getting stronger.

Testing millions of websites from multiple locations

When CloudFlare started offering Enterprise services, they wanted to leverage the data they collect to help stop attacks across the millions of websites on their network. Trey Guinn, a Solution Engineer at CloudFlare explains, “enterprise customers have high expectations, and we want to meet or exceed them. To do so we need to be proactively aware of problems on our customer’s websites - before the customer reports an issue”.

CloudFlare started using Pingdom to monitor key pages across their Enterprise customer’s websites so they could keep tabs on availability and performance. And, since. And, since CloudFlare operates a globally distributed network, it was important for them to be able to test these pages from many different locations. Trey reports when CloudFlare started using Pingdom they, “finally had reporting resource that allowed us see how things were working, in which regions, and what kind of performance we were attaining. And”, Trey adds, “the service is so easy to use and has excellent graphing”.

From uptime monitoring to transactions

When CloudFlare decided to try out Pingdom they started small with a free account, and, according to Trey, could “immediately see the value”. Curious about Pingdom’s potential benefit to CloudFlare, Trey didn’t hesitate to ask for some help. He said, “I wanted to get more out of Pingdom’s service, so I emailed the support team, and they were fantastic. They were super responsive, answered all of my questions, and taught me enough so that I could move on with my project without any issues”.

One of Trey’s projects with Pingdom was to trace transitions for Railgun, one of CloudFlare’s internet performance solutions. Railgun is a WAN optimizer between CloudFlare’s network and the customer’s origin server. Trey said: “we wanted to be able to test content that went over Railgun, as well as content that we were caching”.

Another requirement for CloudFlare was finding a way to do this type of monitoring from many different locations since CloudFlare's network is global. Pingdom helped CloudFlare perform monitoring from multiple geographies, “we have monitoring services that test from one location, and it would be very easy for us to build our own monitoring service, but to go build a globally distributed monitoring service is a whole other story, Pingdom has been an awesome service for CloudFlare” concludes Trey Guinn.