Today, I’m delighted to announce Cache Analytics: a new tool that gives deeper exploration capabilities into what Cloudflare’s caching and content delivery services are doing for your web presence.

Caching is the most effective way to improve the performance and economics of serving your website to the world. Unsurprisingly, customers consistently ask us how they can optimize their cache performance to get the most out of Cloudflare.

With Cache Analytics, it’s easier than ever to learn how to speed up your website, and reduce traffic sent to your origin. Some of my favorite capabilities include:

• See what resources are missing from cache, expired, or never eligible for cache in the first place
• Slice and dice your data as you see fit: filter by hostnames, or see a list of top URLs that miss cache
• Switch between views of requests and data Transfer to understand both performance and cost

An overview of Cache Analytics

Cache Analytics is available today for all customers on our Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans.

In this blog post, I’ll explain why we built Cache Analytics and how you can get the most out of it.

Why do we need analytics focused on caching?

If you want to scale the delivery of a fast, high-performance website, then caching is critical. Caching has two main goals:

First, caching improves** performance**. Cloudflare data centers are within 100ms of 90% of the planet; putting your content in Cloudflare’s cache gets it physically closer to your customers and visitors, meaning that visitors will see your website faster when they request it! (Plus, reading assets on our edge SSDs is really fast, rather than waiting for origins to generate a response.)

Second, caching helps **reduce bandwidth costs associated with operating a presence on the Internet. **Origin data transfer is one of the biggest expenses of running a web service, so serving content out of Cloudflare’s cache can significantly reduce costs incurred by origin infrastructure.

Because it’s not safe to cache all content (we wouldn’t want to cache your bank balance by default), Cloudflare relies on customers to tell us what’s safe to cache with HTTP Cache-Control headers and page rules. But even with page rules, it can be hard to understand what’s actually getting cached — or more importantly, what’s not getting cached, and why. Is a resource expired? Or was it even eligible for cache in the first place?

#analytics #cache #performance #data analytic