Getting started with Cloudflare dashboards

Cloudflare is a widely adopted web performance and security platform, best known for its CDN, DDoS protection, and DNS services. While it provides rich telemetry and real-time analytics, the sheer volume and complexity of the data can make it hard to identify key trends or issues at a glance. This is where a solution like SquaredUp (or another dashboarding tool) comes in.

By integrating with Cloudflare’s APIs, SquaredUp can transform raw performance and security metrics into clear, actionable dashboards that surface what really matters. In this article, we’ll explore how easy it is to create insightful Cloudflare dashboards using the native Cloudflare plugin that helps teams stay informed and respond faster.

Deploying the data source

It is super simple to connect Cloudflare to SquaredUp. All you need is the API token. If you’re not sure how to obtain an API token in Cloudflare, you can refer to the in-product documentation that will walk you through this process end-to-end.

Exploring the out-of-the-box dashboards

Once you’ve deployed the data source, you will notice a few dashboards have been imported out-of-the-box, namely Status, Website, Performance, Security and Traffic. Let's go through a couple of critical ones.

The website dashboard displays traffic data for the specific website corresponding to the DNS zone chosen from the dropdown variable selector. The key metrics include the up/down status of the website, the volume of visitors, requests made to the server, etc. These metrics are very helpful to monitor the growth of your website and catch early signs of a DDoS attack.

There’s also the Security dashboard which is all about the threat activities reported on your website. This includes all threats detected over a period of time, threats originated by regions, by type and so on. There’s also log of firewall activities for quick reference.

There are other dashboards as well that you can explore that will help you get started quickly. For now, we will proceed to create one from the scratch ourselves.

Creating your own dashboards

It is incredibly easy to get started. Hit the + button on a new dashboard to create a tile. You'll be greeted with this screen:

This screen lists out the other data sources you've got installed in your workspace and a list of data streams you recently used. Let’s select the Cloudflare data source that we just deployed.

This data source provides multiple streams covering bandwidth usage, web requests, security threats, firewall activity, and more. There’s even a data stream that allows you to run a GraphQL query to retrieve any custom data you want to fetch.

For this example, let’s choose the “Threats“ data stream. This will return the number of threats detected on the specified DNS zone we select. A threat in this regard is basically a malicious activity detected against this DNS zone such as DNZ spoofing, DDoS attacks, bot activities, and so on.

After selecting the data stream, we are prompted to select the objects (DNS zones) that we want to see this metric. I’ll select one and proceed.

Next, choose the timeframe in the next screen. You can choose from a range starting from 24 hours to even a year ago.

You will notice that by this point, data will have started to be populated. All that’s left now is to choose the visualization of your choice from the top right. For this data, I’ll choose the scalar tile.

On the next screens - Shaping and Columns, you can perform some basic data filtering, sorting, formatting, etc. In addition, if you’re looking for more advanced data manipulation, turn on SQL Analytics which gives you the ability to work on the data using SQL queries. I will add all the threats detected at various times in the last 24 hours and output the total.

Next steps: monitoring and notifications

SquaredUp monitoring lets you easily convert any dashboard tile into an alert, so you'll know right away when something changes. Let's set it up now.

I'll set up monitoring for when the latest value of this metric crosses a threshold.

Switch over to the Monitoring tab on the right and turn it on. Here you can set up your alert rules using the available configuration options.

With the criteria I’ve set, the tile will turn red when the total number of threats crosses a threshold of 1000.

Beyond viewing alerts in SquaredUp, I can also set up notifications to instantly alert me whenever something needs my attention. They can be sent as an email, as an IM message, or forwarded over to any automation workflows.

If the monitor triggers, we can receive a notification by email, Slack, Teams, or via any system that supports webhooks. Read our docs to learn more about monitoring.

Sharing

Sharing is very simple in SquaredUp. We just hit the Share button and have the option of inviting a user to the workspace or sharing just the dashboard via a link:

Get started with SquaredUp

From this point on, you can try out different data streams and queries to create a dashboard of your dreams. In addition, we also have other plugins including Azure, SCOM, Azure DevOps, VMWare, and many others.

SquaredUp’s smarter dashboards help engineering, product, and IT teams make better decisions through a deeper understanding of their data. Visualize and monitor any data from any tool, all in one place. Sign up for free now!