Cloudflare Load Balancing now shows fallback pool traffic separately!

Hi, I'm Shii-chan! Today I found a small but really useful update to Cloudflare's load balancing analytics. It's not flashy, but it makes a real difference when you're troubleshooting an outage.

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

According to Cloudflare's Changelog, Load Balancing Analytics now shows traffic served by your fallback pool as a separate series from traffic routed to the same pool through normal steering. Fallback traffic gets a "(Fallback)" suffix added to the pool name. For example, a pool named eu-west now shows up as eu-west (Fallback).

The story so far

Previously, requests were grouped by pool name alone. If the pool acting as your fallback also received traffic through your regular steering policy, both kinds of traffic showed up as a single combined series on the graph.

Because the fallback pool ignores health checks and just sends traffic there as a last resort, that mixed view made it hard to tell whether Cloudflare was still making health-based routing decisions or had already fallen back to the pool of last resort. That distinction mattered a lot when you were diagnosing an outage or reviewing how much traffic was shed.

What changes

With the "(Fallback)" label, fallback traffic and normally-steered traffic are now visually distinct. During an incident, you can tell at a glance whether requests are still being sent to healthy pools or whether the system has already dropped to fallback mode. This should help SREs and infrastructure engineers assess incidents faster.

Dive Deep

The "(Fallback)" label now appears as its own entry in three views:

• Requests over time — shown as a separate series in the chart
• Pool distribution — shown as a separate segment
• Top endpoints — shown as a separate card for the pool

The Latency view and the health event Logs are unchanged by this update.

You can see this by going to Traffic > Load Balancing Analytics for a zone. The same breakdown also appears in the analytics view for an individual load balancer under Load Balancing at the account level.

Wrap-up

• Fallback pool traffic now shows up as "pool name (Fallback)", as its own series
• The change applies to Requests over time, Pool distribution, and Top endpoints
• The Latency view and health event Logs are unchanged
• You can check it under Traffic > Load Balancing Analytics for a zone, or Load Balancing at the account level

If you already run a fallback pool in Cloudflare Load Balancing, this is a small update that gives you a lot more visibility when it matters most, during an outage.