Free network flow monitoring for all enterprise customers

A key component of effective corporate network security is establishing end to end visibility across all traffic that flows through the network. Every network engineer needs a complete overview of their network traffic to confirm their security policies work, to identify new vulnerabilities, and to analyze any shifts in traffic behavior. Often, it’s difficult to build out effective network monitoring as teams struggle with problems like configuring and tuning data collection, managing storage costs, and analyzing traffic across multiple visibility tools.

Today, we’re excited to announce that a free version of Cloudflare’s network flow monitoring product, Magic Network Monitoring, is available to all Enterprise Customers. Every Enterprise Customer can configure Magic Network Monitoring and immediately improve their network visibility in as little as 30 minutes via our self-serve onboarding process.

Enterprise Customers can visit the Magic Network Monitoring product page, click “Talk to an expert”, and fill out the form. You’ll receive access within 24 hours of submitting the request. Over the next month, the free version of Magic Network Monitoring will be rolled out to all Enterprise Customers. The product will automatically be available by default without the need to submit a form.

How it works

Cloudflare customers Continue reading

Network flow monitoring is GA, providing end-to-end traffic visibility

Network engineers often find they need better visibility into their network’s traffic and operations while analyzing DDoS attacks or troubleshooting other traffic anomalies. These engineers typically have some high level metrics about their network traffic, but they struggle to collect essential information on the specific traffic flows that would clarify the issue. To solve this problem, Cloudflare has been piloting a cloud network flow monitoring product called Magic Network Monitoring that gives customers end-to-end visibility into all traffic across their network.

Today, Cloudflare is excited to announce that Magic Network Monitoring (previously called Flow Based Monitoring) is now generally available to all enterprise customers. Over the last year, the Cloudflare engineering team has significantly improved Magic Network Monitoring; we’re excited to offer a network services product that will help our customers identify threats faster, reduce vulnerabilities, and make their network more secure.

Magic Network Monitoring is automatically enabled for all Magic Transit and Magic WAN enterprise customers. The product is located at the account level of the Cloudflare dashboard and can be opened by navigating to “Analytics & Logs > Magic Monitoring”. The onboarding process for Magic Network Monitoring is self-serve, and all enterprise customers with access can begin Continue reading

How Orpheus automatically routes around bad Internet weather

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet for everyone, and Orpheus plays an important role in realizing this mission. Orpheus identifies Internet connectivity outages beyond Cloudflare’s network in real time then leverages the scale and speed of Cloudflare’s network to find alternative paths around those outages. This ensures that everyone can reach a Cloudflare customer’s origin server no matter what is happening on the Internet. The end result is powerful: Cloudflare  protects customers from Internet incidents outside our network while maintaining the average latency and speed of our customer’s traffic.

A little less than two years ago, Cloudflare made Orpheus automatically available to all customers for free. Since then, Orpheus has saved 132 billion Internet requests from failing by intelligently routing them around connectivity outages, prevented 50+ Internet incidents from impacting our customers, and made our customer’s origins more reachable to everyone on the Internet. Let’s dive into how Orpheus accomplished these feats over the last year.

Increasing origin reachability

One service that Cloudflare offers is a reverse proxy that receives Internet requests from end users then applies any number of services like DDoS protection, caching, load balancing, and / or encryption. If the response Continue reading

Monitor your own network with free network flow analytics from Cloudflare

As a network engineer or manager, answering questions about the traffic flowing across your infrastructure is a key part of your job. Cloudflare built Magic Network Monitoring (previously called Flow Based Monitoring) to give you better visibility into your network and to answer questions like, “What is my network’s peak traffic volume? What are the sources of that traffic? When does my network see that traffic?” Today, Cloudflare is excited to announce early access to a free version of Magic Network Monitoring that will be available to everyone. You can request early access by filling out this form.

Magic Network Monitoring now features a powerful analytics dashboard, self-serve configuration, and a step-by-step onboarding wizard. You’ll have access to a tool that helps you visualize your traffic and filter by packet characteristics including protocols, source IPs, destination IPs, ports, TCP flags, and router IP. Magic Network Monitoring also includes network traffic volume alerts for specific IP addresses or IP prefixes on your network.

Making Network Monitoring easy

Magic Networking Monitoring allows customers to collect network analytics without installing a physical device like a network TAP (Test Access Point) or setting up overly complex remote monitoring systems. Our product works Continue reading

How Cloudflare One solves your observability problems

Today, we’re excited to announce Cloudflare One Observability. Cloudflare One Observability will help customers work across Cloudflare One applications to troubleshoot network connectivity, security policies, and performance issues to ensure a consistent experience for employees everywhere. Cloudflare One, our comprehensive SASE platform, already includes visibility for individual products; Cloudflare One Observability is the next step in bringing data together across the Cloudflare One platform.

Network taps and legacy enterprise networks

Traditional enterprise networks operated like a castle protected by a moat. Employees working from a physical office location authenticated themselves at the beginning of their session, they were protected by an extensive office firewall, and the majority of the applications they accessed were on-premise.

Many enterprise networks had a strictly defined number of “entrances” for employees at office locations. Network taps (devices used to measure and report events on a local network) monitored each entrance point, and these devices gave network administrators and engineers complete visibility into their operations.

Learn more about the old castle-and-moat network security model.

Incomplete observability in today’s enterprise network

Today’s enterprise networks have expanded beyond the traditional on-premise model and have become extremely fragmented. Now, employees can work from anywhere. People access enterprise networks Continue reading