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Observability

Privacy Proxy supports OpenTelemetry for monitoring and observability. You can collect metrics and traces to understand proxy performance and usage.

OpenTelemetry integration

Privacy Proxy exports telemetry data using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) ↗. You can configure an endpoint to receive this data and forward it to your observability platform.

Configure telemetry export

During onboarding, provide Cloudflare with your OpenTelemetry collector endpoint:

  • Endpoint URL: The HTTPS endpoint where telemetry data should be sent.
  • Authentication: Headers or credentials required to authenticate with your collector.

Cloudflare configures your Privacy Proxy instance to export telemetry to this endpoint.

Supported signals

Privacy Proxy exports the following telemetry signals:

SignalDescription
MetricsConnection counts, request rates, latency histograms, error rates
TracesPer-request traces showing proxy processing time. Traces are sampled at approximately 1% of requests.

Metrics

Privacy Proxy exports metrics that help you understand usage patterns and performance.

Connection metrics

MetricDescription
privacy_proxy_connections_totalTotal number of proxy connections
privacy_proxy_connections_activeCurrently active connections
privacy_proxy_connections_duration_secondsConnection duration histogram

Request metrics

MetricDescription
privacy_proxy_requests_totalTotal CONNECT requests processed
privacy_proxy_requests_by_statusRequests grouped by response status code
privacy_proxy_bytes_sent_totalTotal bytes sent to destinations
privacy_proxy_bytes_received_totalTotal bytes received from destinations

Latency metrics

MetricDescription
privacy_proxy_connect_latency_secondsTime to establish connection to destination
privacy_proxy_first_byte_latency_secondsTime to first byte from destination

Server-Timing header

Privacy Proxy includes a Server-Timing header in responses to help measure processing latency from the client side. For full header format details, refer to HTTP headers.

Server-Timing: proxy;dur=12.5

The dur value is the processing time in milliseconds introduced by the proxy. Use this header as a client-side SLI (Service Level Indicator) to monitor proxy performance.

Example: Prometheus and Grafana

To visualize Privacy Proxy metrics in Grafana:

  1. Configure an OpenTelemetry collector to receive data from Privacy Proxy.
  2. Export metrics from the collector to Prometheus.
  3. Create Grafana dashboards using Prometheus as a data source.
Example Prometheus queries
# Request rate over time
rate(privacy_proxy_requests_total[5m])


# 95th percentile connection latency
histogram_quantile(0.95, rate(privacy_proxy_connect_latency_seconds_bucket[5m]))


# Error rate
sum(rate(privacy_proxy_requests_by_status{status=~"5.."}[5m])) / sum(rate(privacy_proxy_requests_total[5m]))

Data privacy

Telemetry data does not include:

  • User IP addresses
  • Request content or headers (beyond what is needed for metrics)
  • Destination URLs or hostnames (aggregated only)
  • Authentication tokens or credentials

Cloudflare exports only operational metrics that help you monitor service health without compromising user privacy.