Cloudflare launches Log Explorer, allowing users to analyze and search their log data directly within the Cloudflare platform.
Cloudflare has made Log Explorer generally available. The tool provides customers with direct access to their log data within the Cloudflare dashboard, with context to detect and address security incidents and performance issues.
Directly in Cloudflare
With Log Explorer, customers no longer need to forward log data to external tools for analysis. According to Cloudflare, this practice often involves high costs, complex configurations, and delays.
Log Explorer enables real-time analysis of log files directly within the Cloudflare environment. The solution is available as an add-on for customers with a self-serve or enterprise subscription, as an alternative to external SIEM tools.
Dashboards and Searching
Users can create custom dashboards to monitor specific security or performance issues. A natural language interface assists in creating charts and dashboards. Cloudflare also provides pre-built dashboards for common scenarios such as bot traffic, API performance, account takeovers, or DDoS attacks. Specifically for that type of attacks, the company reported a significant increase in April.
Cloudflare further equips Log Explorer with a search function that allows users to filter logs, execute SQL queries, or analyze log data via an API. This enables analysts, for example, to investigate whether attackers have spread further into the network after an initial breach.
Collaboration, Alerting, and Archiving
Saved searches enable collaboration between team members. An upcoming feature for custom alerts will allow users to set up notifications based on self-defined searches. Additionally, flexible retention for log files will be introduced, allowing companies to determine how long they keep logs, tailored to their compliance requirements.
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Log Explorer is built on top of Cloudflare R2 and uses the Delta Lake format and Apache Parquet to efficiently store and query log data. Cloudflare developed its own algorithm to intelligently compress log files, significantly improving search performance.