Rule descriptions in Cloudflare logs grow from 80 to 128 bytes!

Hi everyone, it's Shii-chan!

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

Today I found a small update that helps a lot when you read logs: rule descriptions now show up longer!

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Changelog published an update about Rules. Cloudflare logs now include up to 128 bytes of a rule's description.

The story so far

Until now, the rule description in logs was limited to 80 bytes.

Even if you wrote a helpful description, a longer one got cut off in the logs, so you had to go back to the rule's configuration to figure out which rule it was.

What changes

• The description limit in logs goes from 80 bytes to 128 bytes
• When you investigate a matched rule, you get more context from the log alone
• You need to check the configuration less often just to identify a rule

If you run lots of security or traffic rules, this should make investigations easier!

Dive Deep

Here are the details from the original post.

• Descriptions longer than 128 bytes are truncated, and a UTF-8 character is never split in the middle
• The Rulesets API is not affected. It still accepts rule descriptions of up to 4,096 bytes

So only the length shown in logs changed. Rule configuration and the API stay the same.

The limit is in bytes, so multi-byte characters such as Japanese reach it with fewer characters than ASCII text. Putting the most important information at the start of a description is a safe habit.

Wrap-up

• Rule descriptions in logs grow from 80 to 128 bytes
• Anything longer than 128 bytes is truncated without breaking UTF-8 characters
• The Rulesets API limit (4,096 bytes) is unchanged

This one is for the operations folks who want to spot the right rule in the logs quickly!