Detecting Provider Impact Early: Monitoring Playbook for Cloudflare & AWS Disruptions

Detecting Provider Impact Early: Monitoring Playbook for Cloudflare & AWS Disruptions

Hook: When your incident channel floods with “is it just me?” messages, the clock to contain reputational and operational damage starts ticking. Upstream provider issues — Cloudflare routing, DNS, or an AWS regional service degradation — can mimic application bugs and waste hours of engineering time. This playbook gives you the concrete monitoring rules, synthetic checks, traceroute techniques, and alert thresholds you can apply today to detect provider-side problems before users and support teams escalate.

Why this matters in 2026

Supplier incidents remain a leading source of customer-impacting outages. Late 2025 and early 2026 trends show larger-scale routing noise, targeted multi-vector DDoS events, and more frequent transient control-plane degradations across CDN and cloud providers. Teams must shift from reactive firefighting to proactive upstream detection: fewer false positives, faster isolation of provider vs. origin issues, and clear runbooks to reduce MTTR and unnecessary escalations.

High-level strategy (inverted pyramid)

1. Detect early: synthetics + active network probes catch provider faults earlier than user reports.
2. Attribute fast: traceroute, HTTP diagnostics, CDN trace endpoints, and provider status APIs reveal provider-side signals.
3. Escalate correctly: Threshold-driven alerts and a short runbook avoid noisy incidents.
4. Audit & retain: Log and retain telemetry with policies that meet compliance and post-incident analysis needs.

Concrete monitoring rules — what to measure and why

Focus on signals that distinguish provider-side faults from application/origin faults:

• Global synthetic HTTP checks (regionized) — latency, TLS handshake time, HTTP status codes (especially CDN-specific codes like 520/521/522/524).
• DNS resolution times and NXDOMAIN/servfail rates from multiple resolvers.
• TCP-level connectivity: SYN/ACK RTT, RST frequency, and packet loss from multiple vantage points.
• BGP/AS-path changes and visible route flaps affecting provider ASNs.
• Provider status API / statuspage polling for active incidents (automate with your incident tooling — see Outage-Ready principles).
• In-app error rates tagged by upstream (e.g., “cf-ray”, “x-amzn-RequestId”, or ELB headers).

Prometheus-style alert examples

Use these as templates in Prometheus Alertmanager (or similar):

# High-severity: Global HTTP 5xx spike across synthetic checks
- alert: GlobalSynthetic5xxSpike
  expr: (sum by(region)(rate(synthetic_http_requests_total{code=~"5.."}[5m]))
         / sum by(region)(rate(synthetic_http_requests_total[5m]))) > 0.01
  for: 2m
  labels:
    severity: page
  annotations:
    summary: "Global 5xx rate >1% across synthetics"
    description: "Potential CDN/origin issue; check provider status and traceroute from affected regions."
  

# Latency anomaly: 95th percentile latency 3x baseline
- alert: SyntheticLatencyAnomaly
  expr: (histogram_quantile(0.95, sum(rate(synthetic_http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le, region)))
        > (3 * on(region) group_left() synthetic_latency_baseline_seconds)
  for: 2m
  labels:
    severity: warning
  annotations:
    summary: "Synthetic latency >3x baseline"
  

Adjust numeric thresholds to your SLOs; baseline can be a rolling 7–14 day 95th percentile.

Synthetic checks: design and implementation

Synthetics must reflect real user flows and probe the provider surface area:

• HTTP ping: simple GET to health endpoint; validate status code, body, and CDN headers (e.g., Server, CF-Cache-Status, x-cache or Via).
• TLS handshake probe: measure TLS handshake duration and certificate chain issues separately from HTTP latency.
• Full transaction: script login or API workflow with Playwright or k6 for critical paths (auth, file upload, API write) from multiple regions.
• DNS synthetic: query authoritative nameservers and multiple public resolvers; detect SERVFAIL/NXDOMAIN or TTL spikes.
• Traceroute/MTR probes: run periodic traceroutes from each region and compare AS/path baselines.

Example synthetic definitions

HTTP curl probe (lightweight):

# bash snippet for a synthetic probe
start=$(date +%s%3N)
resp=$(curl -s -D - -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{time_connect} %{time_starttransfer} %{time_total} %{ssl_verify_result} %{url_effective}\n" -H "Host: api.example.com" https://edge.example.com/health)
now=$(date +%s%3N)
elapsed=$((now-start))
echo "$resp elapsed_ms=$elapsed"
  

k6 script (transaction check):

import http from 'k6/http';
import { check } from 'k6';
export default function() {
  let res = http.get('https://api.example.com/important');
  check(res, { 'status 200': r => r.status === 200 });
}
  

Schedule these from at least 3 regions (one in each major provider region you rely on). Use a mix of public synthetics (Datadog, NewRelic, Pingdom) and private probes (small EC2 or k8s Job) to isolate provider vs. internet transit issues.

Traceroutes and AS-path monitoring: practical rules

Traceroutes reveal whether a provider’s edge, transit, or DNS tier is failing. Automate baseline captures and detect deviations.

• Run mtr/traceroute from each probe region every 5–10 minutes during peak, 15–30 minutes off-peak.
• Store last 7–30 days of traceroutes for differential analysis.
• Alert when:
• Median hop latency increases >50% for 3+ successive runs
• Packet loss to an intermediate hop >5% (and persists)
• AS path includes a new ASN (sudden detour) or loses expected provider ASN

Automated traceroute example

# Run traceroute and extract AS path via whois (Linux)
TARGET=edge.example.com
traceroute -n -w 2 -q 3 $TARGET | awk '{print $2,$3,$4,$5,$6}' > /tmp/tr_$TARGET.$(date +%s)
# Optionally map IPs to ASNs with whois or Team Cymru
for ip in $(awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) if($i ~ /[0-9]+\.) print $i}' /tmp/tr_$TARGET.* | sort -u); do
  whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v $ip" | tail -n +2
done
  

Better: use pybgpstream or the RIPE/BGPStream APIs to detect BGP route changes for your provider's ASNs. Alert on prefix withdrawals or origin-AS changes for owned prefixes.

Attribution: how to quickly determine Cloudflare vs AWS vs your origin

Follow this short decision tree when you get an alert.

1. Check global versus regional scope: if only one region shows errors, suspect regional AWS or transit issues; if many regions show identical failures, suspect provider-wide Cloudflare/CDN or DNS propagation.
2. Inspect HTTP codes and headers: Cloudflare-specific codes (520/521/522/524) point to a CDN/edge boundary problem. 502/503 with ELB or CloudFront headers point to AWS origin or edge issues.
3. Run provider status API checks: poll status.cloudflare.com/api/v2/summary.json and AWS Health API. Use cached timestamps to avoid flapping alerts.

   # AWS Health CLI (requires Business/Enterprise support plan)
   aws health describe-events --filter "services=EC2" --region us-east-1
         

4. Traceroute & mtr from multiple vantage points to see where packets are dropped or latency spikes.
5. Check DNS resolution from multiple resolvers and authoritative nameservers. If authoritative responds but public resolvers time out, transit/DNS caching issues are likely.

   # Query authoritative and 1.1.1.1
   dig @ns-1.example.net api.example.com A +short
   dig @1.1.1.1 api.example.com A +short
         

Alert thresholds that avoid noise but catch real provider faults

Thresholds must be tuned to your SLOs. Start conservative and tighten with experience:

• SEV1 (Page): Multi-region synthetic 5xx rate >2% sustained for 2 minutes OR packet loss >10% to the edge from ≥2 regions OR BGP origin change for your prefix.
• SEV2 (Investigation): Single-region 5xx rate >3% for 5 minutes OR synthetic 95th percentile latency >3x baseline for 5 minutes OR TLS handshake failure rate >1% across regions.
• SEV3 (Monitor): Single probe transient failure, single DNS SERVFAIL from one resolver, or one-off traceroute hop spike that resolves on the next run.

Runbook: step-by-step play to validate provider impact

1. Confirm alert — Check aggregated synthetics and ticket sources. Correlate with user reports and internal telemetry.
2. Scope: Determine affected regions, endpoints, or services. Use tag-based dashboards (region, service, environment).
3. Run quick checks:
   • curl -v to the edge and origin; inspect response headers (CF-*, Server, Via, X-Cache)
   • Cloudflare trace: curl https://www.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace — look for colo and clientAsn values
   • AWS PHD/API: aws health describe-events — look for ongoing events
4. Network probes: run traceroute/mtr from 3 vantage points; capture pcap if needed (short duration) for packet-level analysis.
5. Provider status: Poll status pages and provider Twitter/incident channels, but do not rely solely on them — they are often updated after automated signals appear.
6. Mitigate: If Cloudflare edge is the culprit, temporarily switch to a fallback origin bypass (if safe) or adjust caching. If AWS region is impacted, failover to another region or use multi-region endpoints (Route 53 failover, Global Accelerator) according to your architecture.
7. Escalate: Open provider support cases with timestamped probe outputs, traceroute results, and synthetic logs. Use the provider’s incident API to attach telemetry quickly. Automate evidence collection as recommended in Outage-Ready.
8. Post-incident: Retain all telemetry, run a RCA, and adjust thresholds and coverage gaps identified during the incident.

Telemetry retention & compliance guidance

Retention helps post-incident RCA and compliance (GDPR or internal audits). Practical retention policy examples:

• Synthetic raw runs and HTTP traces: 90 days (retain 13 months of aggregated metrics if required by audit).
• Traceroute/mtr outputs: 30–90 days (raw PCAPs for incident evidence only; default 30 days).
• DNS query logs: 90 days for operational troubleshooting; if you log client IPs, ensure GDPR controls and minimal retention.
• AWS Health events & provider tickets: retain per your corporate retention schedule (commonly 1–3 years for audit trails).

Integrations & automation to reduce manual work

Automate evidence collection and triage to speed provider escalation:

• On alert, run a Lambda or webhook that executes a standardized probe matrix (curl checks, traceroutes, DNS queries) and attaches results to the incident ticket.
• Use provider APIs to correlate incidents programmatically (statuspage APIs, AWS Health API) and add automated context to alerts.
• Push synthetic anomalies into incident platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) with playbook links and collected logs — tie into your incident automation guidance in Outage-Ready.

Sample automation flow (CLI snippets)

# 1. Poll Cloudflare status JSON
curl -s https://status.cloudflare.com/api/v2/summary.json | jq '.components[] | {name: .name, status: .status}'

# 2. AWS Health (requires permissions)
aws health describe-events --filter "regions=us-east-1" --query 'events[?startTime>=`2026-01-01`]' --output json

# 3. Run quick multi-region traceroutes (example using SSH to probes)
ssh probe-eu 'mtr -rn -c 5 api.example.com' > /tmp/mtr-eu.txt
ssh probe-us 'mtr -rn -c 5 api.example.com' > /tmp/mtr-us.txt
  

2026 trends & future-proofing your monitoring

As of 2026, three shifts matter:

1. Edge-to-origin blur: CDNs like Cloudflare are moving more logic to the edge. Monitor edge-specific signals and application headers (edge worker logs) and codify probes as part of your observability-as-code practice.
2. Observability-as-code: Teams are codifying synthetic checks and traceroute baselines in Git (Terraform, k6 scripts). Store and version-check your probes.
3. Multi-provider resiliency: Architect for graceful degradation (multi-CDN, multi-region, Global Accelerator) and monitor the failover effectiveness with synthetic failover tests — part of edge-first cost-aware strategies.

Adopt an observability pipeline that treats provider telemetry as first-class: BGP feeds, provider status APIs, CDN trace headers, and DNS telemetry should feed into the same correlation engine as application logs and APM traces. Evaluate tooling, including cloud cost & observability tools, to find the right balance of data, retention, and alerting.

Case study (brief, anonymized)

In late 2025, a global SaaS provider saw sporadic login failures across EU users. The alerts initially showed elevated 5xx rates from EU synthetics and a spike in TLS handshake failures. Automated traceroutes indicated a transient AS-path change involving a major transit provider peering with Cloudflare colos. By correlating Cloudflare trace colocation IDs and RIPE BGPStream withdraw events, the team opened a targeted support ticket with transit and Cloudflare, presented traceroute bundles, and implemented a temporary route preference change via BGP communities in 18 minutes, reducing user impact. Root cause analysis showed a misconfigured BGP announcement at a transit peer; post-incident the team added additional synthetic probes in the transit provider’s peer locations and codified new alert thresholds.

Checklist: implement these in the next week

1. Create 3 lightweight synthetics (US, EU, APAC) that check HTTP, TLS, and DNS resolutions every 1–5 minutes.
2. Add traceroute/mtr probes in the same regions and store results for 30–90 days.
3. Implement Prometheus/Grafana alerts above and wire to PagerDuty with a runbook link.
4. Enable AWS Health API access for your account and configure polling for active events.
5. Script automated evidence collection (curl, traceroute, dig) to attach to incidents.

Advanced strategies

• AS-path anomaly detection: Use BGPStream or RouteViews to detect origin-AS changes for your prefixes and alert immediately.
• Active DNS foothold checks: Deploy ephemeral authoritative DNS probes to detect split-horizon or misconfiguration quickly.
• Chaos synthetics: Periodically validate failover paths by simulating an edge or region outage (low-frequency) and verify that multi-CDN or multi-region failover works as expected.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Alert fatigue: set severity tiers and require sustained signals (for example, 2–5 minutes) before paging on provider noise.
• Single-source probes: leverage at least three independent vantage points (public and private) to avoid false positives due to local ISP issues.
• Blind trust in status pages: provider status pages are useful but lag — rely on synthetics and BGP/DNS signals for early detection.

Actionable takeaways

• Implement multi-region synthetics that check HTTP, TLS, and DNS every 1–5 minutes.
• Automate traceroute capture and AS-path comparison and alert on new ASNs or persistent packet loss.
• Use provider APIs (Cloudflare status JSON, AWS Health) to correlate with your telemetry programmatically.
• Set clear thresholds (e.g., global 5xx >1% for 2 min or packet loss >10% from multiple regions) to reduce noisy escalations.
• Codify runbooks and evidence collection scripts to speed provider escalations.

Quick rule: If multiple regions show identical CDN error patterns (Cloudflare-specific HTTP codes, consistent CF- headers), treat it as an upstream provider event until proven otherwise.

Conclusion & call-to-action

If you apply these monitoring rules and automation steps this month you’ll detect upstream provider disruptions earlier, reduce mean time to attribution, and keep support channels calm. Start small: three synthetics and traceroute probes in key regions, a single Prometheus alert to page on true multi-region failures, and an incident automation script to collect evidence. Over time, codify and version your probes so runbook execution becomes predictable and repeatable.

Get started now: Fork or copy the sample Prometheus rules, synthetic scripts, and traceroute collectors in your repo. If you want a checklist PDF and ready-to-run k6/Playwright examples that match this playbook, reach out to our team or download the playbook from our knowledge base.

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