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Security Events — Free plan

Security Events is available for your zone in Security > Events.

​​ Adjusting displayed data

You can apply multiple filters and exclusions to narrow the scope of Security Events and adjust the report duration. Modifying the duration, filters, or exclusions affects the analytics data displayed in the Activity Log.

Example of adding a new filter in Security Events for the Allow action

​​ Add filters

You can adjust the scope of analytics by manually entering filter conditions. Alternatively, select Filter or Exclude to filter by a field value. These buttons appear when you hover the analytics data legend.

To manually add a filter:

  1. Under Security Events, select Add filter.
  2. Select a field, an operator, and a value. For example, to filter events by IP address, select IP for Action, select equals for the operator, and enter the IP address.
  3. Select Apply.

Take the following into account when entering filter values:

  • Do not add quotes around values.
  • Do not enter the AS prefix when entering ASN numbers. For example, enter 1423 instead of AS1423.
  • Wildcards are not supported.

​​ Adjust report duration

To adjust report duration, select the desired duration from the dropdown in Security Events.

The available report duration values depend on your Cloudflare plan. Refer to Availability for details.

​​ Create custom rule from current filters

To create a custom rule based on your current filters and exclusions, select Create custom rule in Security Events.

​​ Activity log

The Activity log summarizes security events by date to show the action taken and the applied Cloudflare security feature.

Example list of events in the Activity log, with one of the events expanded to show its details

Security events are shown by individual event rather than by request. For example, if a single request triggers three different security features, the security events will show three individual events in the Activity log.

Expand each event to check its details, and define filters and exclusions based on the event’s field values. Select the Filter or Exclude button when hovering a field to add the field value to the filters or exclusions list of the displayed analytics. To download the event data in JSON format, select Export event JSON.

​​ Displayed columns

To configure the columns displayed in the Activity log, select Edit columns. This gives you flexibility depending on the type of analysis that you need to perform.

For example, if you are diagnosing a bot-related issue, you may want to display the User agent and the Country columns. On the other hand, if you are trying to identify a DDoS attack, you may want to display the IP address, ASN, and Path columns.

​​ Event actions

For details on most actions that appear in the Activity Log, refer to Actions.

Besides the actions you can select when configuring rules in Cloudflare security products, you may also find events with the following associated actions:

  • Connection Close
  • Force Connection Close

For details on these actions, refer to HTTP DDoS Attack Protection parameters.

The Managed Challenge (Recommended) action that may appear in the Activity Log is available in the following security features and products: WAF custom rules, rate limiting rules, Bot Fight Mode, IP Access rules, User Agent Blocking rules, and firewall rules (deprecated).

​​ Share Security Events filters

When you add a filter and specify a report duration (time window) in Security Events, the Cloudflare dashboard URL changes to reflect the parameters you configured. You can share that URL with other users so that they can analyze the same information that you see.

For example, after adding a filter for Action equals Managed Challenge and setting the report duration to 72 hours, the URL should look like the following:

https://dash.cloudflare.com/{account_id}/example.net/security/events?action=managed_challenge&time-window=4320