JA EN
shiichan

Cloudflare Radar Now Puts TLD Nameserver Speeds on Display!

Cloudflare Changelog ★★★ View Markdown
#cloudflare#infrastructure#web

Hey everyone, it's Shiichan! Today I found a treat for DNS fans, so let me share it with you.

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

Cloudflare Radar added a new feature that lets you see the response speed of a TLD's (top-level domain's) authoritative nameservers. This one was announced in Cloudflare's Changelog.

The speed is measured as the latency Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver sees when it forwards queries upstream to a TLD's nameservers. So it reflects the real response times observed by 1.1.1.1 around the world.

The story so far

Until now, Radar could show you TLD rankings (DNS magnitude), but you couldn't track how fast each TLD's nameservers actually were. The performance of the nameservers behind a domain is usually a hidden world.

What changes

Just open a TLD detail page and you can see authoritative nameserver response times at a glance, by percentile, per nameserver, and by region. For DNS operators, registry folks, and anyone who cares about network health, that's one more objective yardstick.

Dive Deep

The TLD detail page lines up widgets like these:

  • Aggregate authoritative nameserver latency shown as p25 / p50 / p75 percentiles
  • Median (p50) broken down per nameserver over time
  • p50 response time mapped by Cloudflare data center country on a choropleth
  • Daily DNS magnitude ranking (with a Rank / Magnitude toggle)
  • Rank change deltas over 1 week, 4 weeks, and 3 months

For people who want to hit the data directly, there is a new TLD Performance API too. It has two endpoints, and you pick a dimension:

  • summary/{dimension} ... a summary aggregated by dimension
  • timeseries_groups/{dimension} ... a time series grouped by dimension

The available dimensions are LATENCY (aggregate p25/p50/p75), NAMESERVER_LATENCY (per-nameserver p50), and LOCATION_LATENCY (per-data-center-country p50). If you just want to poke around in a browser, it is also available as a dataset in the Data Explorer.

Wrap-up

  • Cloudflare Radar now visualizes TLD authoritative nameserver response times
  • Latency observed by 1.1.1.1 is measured as p25/p50/p75, broken down per nameserver and by country
  • Rankings gained 1-week, 4-week, and 3-month change deltas
  • The new TLD Performance API and Data Explorer let you pull the numbers too

This is a great fit for anyone working on DNS or registry operations, or who wants to follow network health with real numbers!

Related posts