A Clearer Map of Cloudflare’s Request Lifecycle

Cloudflare’s edge processes every HTTP request through a specific sequence of products and features. For years, users have asked which product runs first: Firewall Rules or Workers? Page Rules or Transform Rules? As the platform has expanded, that question has grown more complex, and the documentation required to answer it has become increasingly scattered.

To address this, Cloudflare has introduced Traffic Sequence, a dashboard visualization now enabled by default on all zones. The feature appears on ten product pages, with the currently configured product highlighted in blue within a simplified, high-level diagram of the HTTP request flow. This gives users immediate context about where a given setting fits in the broader lifecycle—and which earlier or later products will be affected by their changes.

Why Order Matters: A Practical Example

The ordering of these products isn’t just a technical curiosity; it has direct consequences for how your rules behave. Consider the Transform Rules feature (released April 2021), which allows you to rewrite URL paths at the edge—for instance, changing /login.php to /super/secret/login-page.php without the visitor noticing.

Now imagine you have a Firewall Rule that blocks requests to /login.php from outside the United States. Visitors from other countries might still reach your server’s /login.php page. Why? Because the URL rewrite happens before Firewall Rules evaluate the request. At that point, the Firewall Rule no longer sees /login.php in the URI Path; it sees /super/secret/login-page.php. Both conditions in your rule fail to match, and the traffic passes through.

Traffic Sequence makes this dependency visible. With the diagram showing that transform rules execute first, you can adjust your Firewall Rule to target the rewritten value instead—avoiding the need to dig through support docs or experiment with live traffic.

From an Explainer Sketch to a Dashboard-Wide Feature

The feature began as a "back of the napkin" sketch during the development of Transform Rules and URL Normalization, meant to show where those transformations occur in the request flow. It quickly became clear that the same visual could answer a much wider set of questions—internal and external alike.

As the team iterated, they focused on a few key questions:

  • What should the diagram show if a customer isn’t using a specific product?
  • How do we handle products not included in a user’s current plan?
  • Should the visualization appear by default?

The result is a diagram that displays only products relevant to the user’s zone and plan. The goal was to simplify a large and growing ecosystem without sacrificing accuracy, while also making the dashboard more navigable—reducing unnecessary clicks to reach the right settings.

Early user testing brought positive feedback and valuable adjustments. For example, the team split Transform Rules into separate sections for URL rewrites versus header modifications, as those occur at different points in the request flow. They also added IP Access Rules to the visualization based on tester requests. Feedback from the community confirmed the core value proposition:

  • “I didn't know where my requests were going... until now.”
  • “It's really handy to be able to explain the ordering that these are happening in.”

Rolling Out and Looking Ahead

This feature is now live for all zones by default. You can hide the visualization anytime with the “hide” button, and the diagram will collapse automatically when screen space is at a premium.

One limitation to keep in mind: Traffic Sequence is a high-level overview, which means it does not display every product or security feature that impacts traffic. The team notes that some nuance remains beneath the surface, and plans are already in place to build a more detailed, "traceroute-like" view. That future feature would let users trace a request through each individual product to see exactly what happens along the way.

Till then, Traffic Sequence provides a reliable atlas: not every street-level detail, but enough to know your way around. For any confusion not resolved by the diagram, you can continue the conversation on the Cloudflare Community.