Custom Hostname Analytics: Giving SaaS Customers a Window Into Their Own Traffic
When a customer onboards onto a SaaS platform, that platform typically sits in front of the customer’s traffic. For SaaS providers using Cloudflare, that means their customers’ websites are being accelerated and protected by Cloudflare’s network. Until now, the insights into that activity—request volume, geographic distribution, blocked threats—were visible primarily to the SaaS provider, not the end customer.
Custom Hostname Analytics aims to change that. It gives SaaS providers the tools to see aggregated traffic across all of their custom hostnames, while also enabling them to surface the same kinds of analytics to each individual customer.
What the Provider Sees
If you operate a SaaS service—imagine your own shop.theburritobot.com for burrito shops—your customers may access your service via a subdomain of your zone (like dina.theburritobot.com) or via their own domain (like burrito.example.com). Either way, every request to those hostnames passes through your infrastructure and Cloudflare’s network.
For the SaaS provider, the analytics can answer operational and business questions: total request counts, which customer is transferring the most data, and where traffic is originating geographically. This kind of visibility can inform billing decisions (e.g., charging heavier users accordingly) or scaling strategy (e.g., adding new origins in regions where customer counts are growing).
What the Customer Sees
Individual customers want the same level of insight about their own site. They want to know page views, whether bots are hitting their endpoints, and how fast their pages are loading. With Custom Hostname Analytics, providers can access those metrics per hostname and choose to present them in their own dashboards or reports.
Building Custom Dashboards
The most flexible approach is to use the GraphQL Analytics API, querying with the clientRequestHTTPHost field to isolate traffic for any customer’s domain. This allows providers to decide which data is relevant and display it however they see fit.
For example, a provider extending Bot Management to its customers can query per-hostname bot metrics and show each customer the volume of malicious traffic being blocked on their behalf.
Using the Dashboard
If you prefer not to build a custom interface, the Cloudflare Dashboard also supports custom hostname analytics. You can look up totals for a single hostname, or apply a filter like Host does not equal theburritobot.com to see aggregated traffic across all your custom hostnames.
Scope of Available Data
Custom Hostname Analytics covers essentially the same datasets available for your own domain. Any dataset in the GraphQL Analytics API that includes the clientRequestHTTPHost field can be used, ranging from firewall events to bot protection metrics.
The Cloudflare for SaaS beta is still accepting signups, with general availability expected down the road.
