Instant Logs

Instant Logs allows Cloudflare customers to access a live stream of the traffic for their domain from the Cloudflare dashboard or from a command-line interface (CLI). Seeing data in real time allows you to investigate an attack, troubleshoot, debug or test out changes made to your network. Instant Logs is lightweight, simple to use and does not require any additional setup.

​​ Availability

​​ Instant Logs on the Cloudflare dashboard

1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard Open external link .

2. Select the domain you want to use with Instant Logs.

3. Go to Analytics > Instant Logs.

4. Select Start streaming.

5. Select Add filters to narrow down the events shown.

The filters you can add are ASN, Cache status, Country, Client IP, Host, HTTP method, Path, Status code, Firewall action matches, and Firewall rule ID matches. If you would like to filter on additional criteria, leave us feedback on the form linked on the Instant Logs page.

Once a filter is selected and the stream has started, only log lines that match the filter criteria will appear. Filters are not applied retroactively to logs already showing in the dash.

​​ Instant Logs on the CLI

​​ 1. Create an Instant Logs Job

Create a session by sending a POST request to our Instant Logs job endpoint with the following parameters:

• Fields - List any field available in our HTTP request dataset.

• Sample - The sample parameter is the sample rate of the records set by the client: "sample": 1 is 100% of records "sample": 10 is 10% and so on.

• Filters - Use filters to drill down into specific events. Filters consist of three parts: key, operator and value. The keys we support are Client ASN, CacheCacheStatus, ClientCountry, ClientIP, ClientRequestHost, ClientRequestMethod, ClientRequestPath, EdgeResponseStatus, FirewallMatchesAction, and FirewallMatchesRuleIDs.

This is the list of the supported operators that we have available:

Below we have three examples of filters:

"filter":"{\"where\":{\"and\":[{\"key\":\"ClientCountry\",\"operator\":\"neq\",\"value\":\"ca\"}]}}"

"filter":"{\"where\":{\"and\":[{\"key\":\"EdgeResponseStatus\",\"operator\":\"in\",\"value\":\"200,201\"}]}}"

"filter":"{\"where\":{\"and\":[{\"key\":\"ClientRequestPath\",\"operator\":\"contains\",\"value\":\"/static\"}, {\"where\":{\"and\":[{\"key\":\"ClientRequestHost\",\"operator\":\"eq\",\"value\":\"theburritobot.com\"}]}}"

Example request using cURL:

curl -X POST 'https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/${ZONE_ID}/logpush/edge/jobs' \
-H 'X-Auth-Key: <KEY>' \
-H 'X-Auth-Email: <EMAIL>' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
    "fields": "ClientIP,ClientRequestHost,ClientRequestMethod,ClientRequestURI,EdgeEndTimestamp,EdgeResponseBytes,EdgeResponseStatus,EdgeStartTimestamp,RayID",
    "sample": 1,
    "filter": "",
    "kind": "instant-logs"
}' | jq .

Response:

The response will include a new field called destination_conf. The value of this field is your unique WebSocket address that will receive messages from Cloudflare’s global network.

{
    "errors": [],
    "messages": [],
    "result": {
        "id": 401,
        "fields": "ClientIP,ClientRequestHost,ClientRequestMethod,ClientRequestURI,EdgeEndTimestamp,EdgeResponseBytes,EdgeResponseStatus,EdgeStartTimestamp,RayID",
        "sample": 100,
        "filter": "",
        "destination_conf": "wss://logs.cloudflare.com/instant-logs/ws/sessions/99d471b1ca3c23cc8e30b6acec5db987",
        "kind": "instant-logs"
    },
    "success": true
}

​​ 2. Connect to WebSocket

Using a CLI utility like Websocat Open external link , you can connect to the WebSocket and start immediately receiving logs.

$ websocat wss://logs.cloudflare.com/instant-logs/ws/sessions/99d471b1ca3c23cc8e30b6acec5db987

Response:

Once connected to the websocket, you will receive messages of line-delimited JSON.

​​ Angle Grinder

Now that you have a connection to Cloudflare’s websocket and are receiving logs from Cloudflare’s global network, you can start slicing and dicing the logs. A handy tool for this is Angle Grinder Open external link . Angle Grinder lets you apply filtering, transformations and aggregations on stdin with first class JSON support. For example, to get the number of visitors from each country you can sum the number of events by the ClientCountry field.

$ websocat wss://logs.cloudflare.com/instant-logs/ws/sessions/99d471b1ca3c23cc8e30b6acec5db987 | agrind '* | json | sum(sampleInterval) by ClientCountry'

Response:

​​ Datasets available

For the moment, HTTP requests is the only dataset available. In the future, we will expand to other datasets.

​​ Export

You can download the table of logs that appears in your dash using the Export button. The data will be downloaded in JSON format.

​​ Limits

Instant Logs has three limits set in place:

• Only one active Instant Logs session per zone.
• Maximum session time is 60 minutes.
• If you stop listening to a socket for more than five minutes.

If either of these limits are reached, the logs stream will automatically stop.

​​ Connect with us

If you have any feature requests or notice any bugs, share your feedback directly with us by joining the Cloudflare Developers community on Discord Open external link .