You may be using the services of Cloudflare to secure and protect your websites and APIs. As part of those services, Cloudflare will block any incoming traffic from malicious users who are using automated tools or bots (sometimes as part of a bot network) to gain access to resources provided by your sites and APIs.
Cloudflare uses various technologies such as Rate Limiting, IP and Country blocking, Anti-DDoS technology, and CAPTCHA to help verify requests from legitimate users and block those from automated bots.
Cloudflare also provides a Verified Bot service that allows you to designate specific bots that should be granted access to your websites and APIs. This service will ensure that requests from the designated bots are verified and allowed through, while all other bots will be blocked, providing additional security for your sites.
Uptrends is a verified bot
The monitoring activities performed by Uptrends to test the availability and performance of your web pages, user journeys and APIs are in fact bot activity: Automated processes are used to continually access your web servers.
Uptrends is one of Cloudflare’s verified bot partners. Cloudflare is aware of Uptrends’ public monitoring locations — the checkpoint network — and they regularly refresh the list of IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) from which monitoring on your sites takes place.
This means that by configuring Cloudflare and Uptrends together, your website and API resources are protected from malicious bots while monitoring traffic from Uptrends is allowed through the Cloudflare firewall.
The verified bots list
As part of Cloudflare Radar, a curated list of bots is published as the Verified bots list. All legitimate services may apply to be included in the list of bots that are trusted by Cloudflare.
Uptrends went through the application process and Cloudflare has confirmed that Uptrends is a fully verified bot. Unfortunately, Cloudflare only publishes a part of their verified bots on their verified bots list and while Uptrends is a fully verified bot, you won’t find it on that list.
Troubleshooting
Despite Cloudflare’s confirmation that Uptrends is a verified bot, and that the checkpoint servers’ IP addresses are whitelisted at Cloudflare, some Uptrends users are still reporting problems from time to time.
When Cloudflare happens to block incoming traffic that originates from one of the checkpoint locations, it will appear as though your site is not available — from a monitoring perspective.
We continue working with Cloudflare to get these problems resolved, and your help is needed to understand more about why that is happening.
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When you see unexpected outages that may be caused by Cloudflare blocking incoming traffic from Uptrends, take note of which checkpoint locations are having trouble accessing your site or API, and which aren’t.
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Please file a ticket for Uptrends Support with this information, so we can help identify if this is a whitelisting problem with Cloudflare, or something else.
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Cloudflare Support also encourages you to contact them. If you are trying to make configuration changes to your Cloudflare firewall rules, make sure to read this Cloudflare article Firewall rules actions.
Thank you for your cooperation and understanding as we work together with Cloudflare to make sure that Uptrends monitoring is always performed in a secure way.