I use https://uptimerobot.com/, a free service that notifies me via email whenever my site is down. That service basically checks my site every 5 minutes.
I’m curious if Cloudflare Analytics knows how to exclude these types of requests from their “Unique Visitors” statistics for my website.
I have a private low traffic setup, which is monitored by Uptime Robot. I guess it’s negligible. Not present?
The last 6 hours:
Good to hear.
I guess I could turn off the bot for one hour during the weekend and check if there is a difference in analytics compared to the previous and next hour.
Or turn off the bot every other hour and check if there’s an up/down pattern.
You could simply bypass Cloudflare and hit your server directly. In this way the checks wouldnt be counted by Cloudflare and you’d also check your actual server connectivity and not Cloudflare’s (and only indirectly yours).
I tried to add a “direct” CNAME in the DNS config that has Cloudflare disabled, but I’m getting a “SSL handshake failed” message when I try to visit that subdomain. I fear I don’t have the knowledge to figure out what is going on here.
I would not bypass Cloudflare for Uptimerobot service, because you want it to see what the visitors see. You could have a situation where your origin server is apparently OK when checked directly, but for some reason Cloudlfare is returning those 5XX error codes to your visitors.
I set two monitors by Uptimerobot for each URL I want to monitor: one a regular HTTP monitor, another a keyword monitor where it checks for the word “Cloudflare”.
If the tests mentioned in this thread in fact show that every hit by Uptimerobot is counted, the way to handle this is to discount the visits by Uptimerobot out of the total Cloudflare provides in its analytics.
Ok, I have some results.
I paused the bot for 1 hour on three occasions today (marked in red). The average number of unique visitors per hour is roughly 45, and the average number of requests per hour is around 100.
The bot doesn’t seem to affect the stats. Cloudflare may count it as one unique visitor per day, or in the worst-case scenario, one unique visitor per hour, but this all seems negligible to me.
