Cloudflare Launches Privacy-First Analytics Tool

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Cloudflare Launches Privacy-First Analytics Tool

engine

4:32 pm on Sep 30, 2020 (gmt 0)

Cloudflare has launched what it describes as a privacy-first analytics tool.

I’m especially excited about two features in our time series charts: the ability to drag-to-zoom into a narrower time range, and the ability to “group by” different dimensions to see data in a different way. This is a super powerful way to drill into an anomaly in traffic and quickly see what’s going on. For example, you might notice a spike in traffic, zoom into that spike, and then try different groupings to see what contributed the extra clicks.

Existing Cloudflare on Pro, Biz, and Enterprise plans go to the Analytics tab.

Non Cloudflare customers just need to add JavaScript to start the analytics.

[blog.cloudflare.com...]

thecoalman

12:12 pm on Oct 13, 2020 (gmt 0)

More data is always nice. While I can understand them not using something like fingerprinting browsers I'm not sure why they wouldn't provide something like the IP. I viewed the analytics pane after reading this and happened to see spike in traffic. Bot from AWS servers I had to to identify using my own stats. It's basic information already available to me. Doiesn't really make much sense for them to not provide it.

engine

1:31 pm on Oct 13, 2020 (gmt 0)

I'm not sure why they wouldn't provide something like the IP.

Perhaps they are sidestepping privacy concerns.

thecoalman

11:59 am on Oct 16, 2020 (gmt 0)

I'm not sure what the privacy concern would be, any data related to IP activity on my site I already have. Granted they may have better tools and can analyze it better but we are talking about an IP. Generally speaking the only thing I'm looking for as far as IP activity goes is illegitimate traffic.

tangor

7:51 pm on Oct 21, 2020 (gmt 0)

Looks like another step by big tech to keep the numbers to themselves while making everyone else "feel good privacy" ....

Give me the IP and get out of my way. Please!

thecoalman

10:04 am on Oct 23, 2020 (gmt 0)

They aren't necessarily hiding the IP, just in the analytics section on the Cloudflare dashboard. If your domain is proxied through Cloudflare all IP's are of course from Cloudflare but they add a bunch of headers including the client IP.

cf-connecting-ip

They even add data you would not necessarily have like a country code. You need to install mod_cloudflare or mod_remoteip so Apache logs, web applications etc. are logging client IP.

Off topic but this is quite useful for other purposes, you can firewall ports 80 and 443 and only accept Cloudflare IP's. :)