Cloudflare enables native monitoring with Log Explorer

Hello everyone. Welcome to Cloudflare TV. My name is Zhiyuan. I am the Product Manager in Application Security. Joining me today with Jen Sells. We are in the same team building a security solution to make the Internet better. I'm really excited to present here and to discuss about what we're launching today with Jen. There are a lot of things happening for Security Week. This is our yearly Security Week at the very beginning of the year. We are building many features to make AI safer, to make your application safer, to make your SaaS environment safer. There's a lot to look out for. It spans the whole week from Sunday when we open the week until Saturday when we close it off. Definitely look forward to check out all we launch this week. For this particular section, we are going to look into a specific topic, which is monitoring and forensics. That's what we're going to expand more to you today. Before that, I will hand it over to Jen to introduce herself. Thanks for having me. As Zhiyuan mentioned, we work together in our Application Security Group, both as Product Managers. In that group, I look after all of the analytics and logs offerings that bring you visibility into what's going on with your Cloudflare products. I'm excited to talk to you today about a couple of new features that we will be announcing this week. That's awesome. Let's get into it. The blog that we are launching today, and hopefully you have already read it, but now we are going to expand it in details of each of the sections. First of all, it is a feature called Log Explorer. Jen, what is Log Explorer? Log Explorer is a tool that gives customers the ability to store and query their Cloudflare logs natively within our network. It leverages our massive data pipeline to collect these logs, and then we store them within our object storage platform, R2. We've created a SQL query-based interface that lets you review these logs right there within the native Cloudflare dashboard. And that's awesome. We are always expanding capabilities, especially making it simpler when using our well-built dashboard. Then the follow-up question is, it sounds to be a great concept and connecting a lot of pieces, also making use of the existing Cloudflare technologies. Why have we decided to build it from the beginning? Customers use our analytics dashboards like Security Analytics to identify anomalies and potential attacks. But very often when they're doing these types of explorations, the very next step in the process is to do a deep dive, looking for forensic data and doing an investigation on the actual events. Because our analytics dashboards use adaptive sampling in the background, these forensic searches were not possible for most of our customers. Before Log Explorer, they would have to use our Log Push feature to send those logs to third-party tools in order to do this investigation. These tools can be very expensive to set up and maintain, and we received a lot of feedback from our customers that they would just prefer to keep their logs within Cloudflare. Indeed. And funnily enough, yesterday I was talking to one of our customers because of Gen AI is the hottest topic for the past years. And one of the topics that we're discussing around that is the ability to be able to look into individual prompts that people are trying to talk to the Gen AI. Because a lot of times, just showing a sample view of what's happening is just not enough. And because of the high risk, because of the new technology, there's a tendency that customers want to be better protected. And what that means is definitely the visibility. And then in that discussion, when we talk about the visibility, we really focus on that we need to have 100% of the capability to store exactly what has been passing through of the traffic. And that visibility gives the confidence of forensics and reviews. So for Log Explorer, I understand that we have the functionality already for quite a while now. But the question next is, what are we announcing today? So when we launched Log Explorer last year, it supported the logs from our application security and performance part of the system. Specifically, that's the HTTP request and security event data sets. Today, we are announcing that we are extending this to also support our Zero Trust product suite with the addition of seven new data sets from our Access Gateway and CASB products. That sounds a lot and definitely very exciting, especially to connect the dots together. Besides Log Explorer, another very interesting feature that I read in your blog is about the custom dashboard. So how does that play with the Log Explorer and what it is really about custom dashboard that we are building? Yeah, so logs, as some folks know, can be very voluminous and there's a lot of information there to dig through. So we created custom dashboards to give them a starting point to begin those investigations. We have that with our existing analytics in the dashboard today, but security monitoring is not a one-size -fits-all. So custom dashboards allow customers to create a very curated interface and tracking the metrics and details that matter most to them. And that's very exciting, especially for the past years. We spent a lot of time just tweaking the standalone and the dashboard that we have. That's available to everyone. But of course, a lot of the feedback that we have heard is that it's just not enough. And we do try to talk to a lot of customers and understand the need. But again, there's no one-size-fits -all there. So that sounds amazing. How can customers sign up for the launch? The custom dashboards is available to any customer that's participating in the Log Explorer beta today. And customers who are interested in also seeing the Zero Trust datasets can get added to that beta and anyone who's interested in custom dashboards as well. In order to do that, there's a form link at the bottom of my blog post where you can click to request to be a member of the beta and a member of your account team will reach out to you. That sounds awesome. And well, I myself are definitely going to give it a try for the websites and applications that I'm hosting on Cloudflare. So fantastic. Now we have talked about what we're launching right now and the new capabilities and definitely give it a spin to see how you can connect the dot better through our platform. But the question that people always ask is, what's next? When do we expect more? Can you share a little bit more about that? Yeah, I am very excited about what we're announcing today, but I think I'm even more excited about what's coming next. So in Q2, we will be working on doing some more integrations between custom dashboards and Log Explorer, where you'll be able to track the metrics and stats in custom dashboards and then easily click through to review the logs related to any anomaly that you want to investigate. And additionally, within Log Explorer, we'll be adding some more capabilities around the ability to save queries and run them on a schedule as another way to more proactively detect suspicious activity. Looking forward. And one of the common feedback that I've often heard, but also across the board is that Cloudflare aims to make the process simple, making the Internet safer and also make it much easier for you as a customer to be able to go through the entire process. And this is one piece of the puzzle and very exciting that now we finally have the capability to offer you more customized and also being able to dig further deeper to secure your web properties. So I guess that's for today's announcement and definitely look forward to more the upcoming days. Thank you very much for joining us. Have a nice day. Thank you for having me.