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DEX tests can now reach behind the login wall!

Cloudflare Changelog ★★★ View Markdown
#cloudflare#security#devops

Hey everyone, it's Shiichan! Today's story makes network monitoring a little smarter. Now it can properly check the apps that sit behind a login wall!

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

Over on Cloudflare's Changelog, the Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX for short) tests got an update. They can now reach apps that were previously out of reach: the ones protected by authentication!

Specifically, you can now run tests against apps protected by Cloudflare Access, as well as third-party authenticated resources. The secrets used for authentication are managed together in Cloudflare Secret Store.

The story so far

DEX tests continuously check "can this app open quickly?" from the point of view of your employees' devices. But until now, if an app had a login wall, it was hard to test past that point. The screens people actually use usually live inside authentication, so not being able to measure them felt a bit frustrating.

What changes

From now on you can measure the experience of apps that live behind authentication. Whether it's an internal tool behind Access or a post-login page on an external SaaS, DEX will watch whether it's connecting fine and not getting slow. And since credentials are stored in Secret Store, you don't have to write passwords directly into your test config, which is lovely. It gets a lot easier for IT admins to notice trouble before users do.

Dive Deep

The configuration side got stronger too. Here's what you can now use in Digital experience tests:

  • More HTTP methods: DELETE, PATCH, POST, and PUT are now available
  • Headers sourced from Cloudflare Secret Store, custom plain text headers, and custom request bodies
  • Advanced settings: follow redirects, response bodies, response headers, and allow untrusted certificates

Instead of just poking with GET, you can send data with POST or tweak headers, so you can check an app's state in a shape much closer to production.

Wrap-up

  • DEX's Digital experience tests now support authenticated apps (Cloudflare Access / third-party auth)
  • Authentication secrets are managed together in Cloudflare Secret Store
  • New HTTP methods (DELETE/PATCH/POST/PUT), custom headers and bodies, and advanced settings like follow redirects were added

This update lands best for IT admins who watch the experience of internal apps and SaaS with Cloudflare One!

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