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Quickstart


Last updated Apr 16, 2026|Copy as Markdown|View as Markdown|Agent setup

OverviewBefore you beginCreate a monitorCreate poolsConfirm pool health Unexpected health statusCreate a load balancer on a test subdomain Create a Public load balancer Create a Private load balancerOptional - Review load balancing analyticsRoute production trafficOptional - Next steps Usage-based notifications Additional configuration options




Get up and running quickly with Load Balancing. For more in-depth explanations, refer to the Learning path.

This guide assumes you are familiar with the Cloudflare Load Balancing components.


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Before you begin


Make sure you:

Have access to multiple Any service or hardware that intercepts and processes incoming public or private traffic.
" class="glossary-tooltip" tabindex="0" data-astro-cid-hklyqugd>endpoints (origin servers, private or public IP addresses, virtual IP addresses (VIPs), etc), either physical or cloud-based.

Have access to Load Balancing, available as an add-on for any type of account.

Have test and production hostnames that are covered by SSL/TLS certificates.


Create a monitor


A monitor issues health monitor requests at regular intervals to evaluate the health of each endpoint within a pool.

When a pool becomes unhealthy, your load balancer takes that pool out of the endpoint rotation.





Set up the monitor
You can create a monitor within the load balancer workflow or in the Monitors tab:


Go to Load Balancing.



Select the Monitors tab.



Select Create monitor.



Add the following information:
Type: The protocol to use for health monitors
Non-enterprise customers: Choose HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP.

Enterprise customers: Choose HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP ICMP, ICMP Ping, or SMTP.


Path: The endpoint path to run health monitor requests against

Port: The destination port for health monitors




For additional settings, select Advanced health monitor settings:
Interval:
By increasing the default, you can improve failover time, but you may also increase load on your endpoints.

Minimum time in seconds is 60 (Pro), 15 (Business), and 10 (Enterprise).


Timeout and Retries:
The health monitor request will return unhealthy if it exceeds the duration specified in Timeout (and exceeds this duration more times than the specified number of Retries).


Expected Code(s): The expected HTTP response codes listed individually (200, 302) or as a range (for example, entering 2xx would cover all response codes in the 200 range).

Response Body:
Looks for a case-insensitive substring in the response body.

Make sure that the value is relatively static and within the first 10 KB of the HTML page.


Simulate Zone:
It is recommended to use the same zone in which the Load Balancer exists.

Changes the egress zone settings of a health monitor request to ensure compatibility with features like Authenticated Origin Pulls (mTLS), Argo Smart Routing, Bring your own CA (mTLS), Dedicated CDN Egress IPs, and HTTP/2 to Origin.


Follow Redirects:
Instead of reporting a 301 or 302 code as unhealthy, the health monitor request follows redirects to the final endpoint.


Configure Request Header(s):
Useful if your endpoints are expecting specific incoming headers.


Header:
The HTTP request headers to send in the health monitor. It is recommended that you set a Host header by default. The User-Agent header cannot be overridden. This parameter is only valid for HTTP and HTTPS monitors.





Select Save.



Note


To increase confidence in pool status, you can also increase the consecutive_up and consecutive_down fields when creating a monitor with the API.

To become healthy or unhealthy, monitored endpoints must pass this health monitor request the consecutive number of times specified in these parameters.


Prepare your servers
Make sure that your firewall or web server does not block or rate limit your configured health monitors or requests associated with Cloudflare IP addresses ↗.

Each health monitor has the HTTP user-agent of "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Cloudflare-Traffic-Manager/1.0; +https://www.cloudflare.com/traffic-manager/; pool-id: $poolid)", where the $poolid is the first 16 characters of the associated pool.


Caution


If you know that your endpoint is healthy but Load Balancing is reporting it as unhealthy, refer to our Monitor troubleshooting guide.




Set up the monitor
For a full list of monitor properties, refer to Create Monitor. If you need help with API authentication, refer to Cloudflare API documentation.

Required API token permissions
At least one of the following token permissions is required:
Load Balancing: Monitors and Pools Write
Create Monitorbashcurl "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$ACCOUNT_ID/load_balancers/monitors" \ --request POST \ --header "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN" \ --json '{ "type": "https", "description": "Login page monitor", "method": "GET", "path": "/health", "header": { "Host": [ "example.com" ], "X-App-ID": [ "abc123" ] }, "port": 8080, "timeout": 3, "retries": 0, "interval": 90, "expected_body": "alive", "expected_codes": "2xx", "follow_redirects": true, "allow_insecure": true, "consecutive_up": 3, "consecutive_down": 2, "probe_zone": "example.com" }'
The response contains the complete definition of the new monitor.
Responsejson{ "success": true, "errors": [], "messages": [], "result": { "id": ":monitor-id", "created_on": "2021-01-01T05:20:00.12345Z", "modified_on": "2021-01-01T05:20:00.12345Z", "type": "https", "description": "Login page monitor", "method": "GET", "path": "/health", "header": { "Host": [ "example.com" ], "X-App-ID": [ "abc123" ] }, "port": 8080, "timeout": 3, "retries": 0, "interval": 90, "expected_body": "alive", "expected_codes": "2xx", "follow_redirects": true, "allow_insecure": true, "consecutive_up": 3, "consecutive_down": 2, "probe_zone": "example.com" }}Prepare your servers
Make sure that your firewall or web server does not block or rate limit your configured health monitors or requests associated with Cloudflare IP addresses ↗.

Each health monitor has the HTTP user-agent of "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Cloudflare-Traffic-Manager/1.0; +https://www.cloudflare.com/traffic-manager/; pool-id: $poolid)", where the $poolid is the first 16 characters of the associated pool.


Caution


If you know that your endpoint is healthy but Load Balancing is reporting it as unhealthy, refer to our Monitor troubleshooting guide.






Example monitor configuration

Field	Value
Type	HTTP
Path	/
Port	80
Interval	60
Method	GET
Timeout	5 seconds
Retries	2
Expected Code(s)	200

Create pools


Within Cloudflare, pools represent your endpoints and how they are organized. As such, a pool can be a group of several endpoints, or you could also have only one endpoint (an origin server, for example) per pool.

If you are familiar with DNS terminology, think of a pool as a “record set,” except Cloudflare only returns addresses that are considered healthy. You can attach health monitors to individual pools for customized monitoring. A pool can have either a single monitor or a monitor group attached — but not both.






You can create a pool within the load balancer workflow or in the Pools tab:


Go to Load Balancing.



Select the Pools tab and then Create pool.



For your pool, enter the following information:

A name (must be unique)

A description to provide more detail on the name

A choice for Endpoint Steering, which affects how your pool routes traffic to each endpoint



For each endpoint, enter the following information:

A name (must be unique)

The endpoint address or associated hostname

(Optional) A Virtual Network. Required when the endpoint has a private IP address.

A Weight

(Optional) A hostname by clicking Add host header

(Optional) The destination port to which the traffic will be served.



Note


If your endpoint is a website or application hosted on Cloudflare Pages, you will need to fill in the host header field with the project domain for it to resolve correctly.




Repeat this process for additional endpoints in the pool.



(Optional) Set up coordinates for Proximity Steering on the pool.



On the pool, update the following information:

Health Threshold:
The Health Threshold is the number of healthy endpoints for the pool as a whole to be considered Healthy and receive traffic based on pool order in a load balancer. Increasing this number makes the pool more reliable, but also more likely to become unhealthy.


Monitor: Attach a monitor

Health Monitor Regions: Choose whether to check pool health from multiple locations, which increases accuracy but can lead to probe traffic to your endpoint

Pool Notifications: You can set up new alerts - and view existing alerts - to be notified when pools are enabled or disabled, or pools or endpoints have changes in their health status.



When finished, select Save.




For a full list of properties, refer to Create Pool. If you need help with API authentication, refer to Cloudflare API documentation.

Required API token permissions
At least one of the following token permissions is required:
Load Balancing: Monitors and Pools Write
Create Poolbashcurl "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$ACCOUNT_ID/load_balancers/pools" \ --request POST \ --header "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN" \ --json '{ "description": "Primary data center - Provider XYZ", "name": "primary-dc-1", "enabled": false, "load_shedding": { "default_percent": 0, "default_policy": "random", "session_percent": 0, "session_policy": "hash" }, "minimum_origins": 2, "monitor": "f1aba936b94213e5b8dca0c0dbf1f9cc", "check_regions": [ "WEU", "ENAM" ], "origins": [ { "name": "app-server-1", "address": "0.0.0.0", "enabled": true, "weight": 0.56, "header": { "Host": [ "example.com" ] } } ], "origin_steering": { "policy": "random" }, "notification_filter": { "origin": { "disable": false, "healthy": null }, "pool": { "disable": false, "healthy": null } } }'
The response contains the complete definition of the new pool.
Responsejson{ "success": true, "errors": [], "messages": [], "result": { "id": "17b5962d775c646f3f9725cbc7a53df4", "created_on": "2021-01-01T05:20:00.12345Z", "modified_on": "2021-01-01T05:20:00.12345Z", "description": "Primary data center - Provider XYZ", "name": "primary-dc-1", "enabled": false, "load_shedding": { "default_percent": 0, "default_policy": "random", "session_percent": 0, "session_policy": "hash" }, "minimum_origins": 2, "monitor": "f1aba936b94213e5b8dca0c0dbf1f9cc", "check_regions": [ "WEU", "ENAM" ], "origins": [ { "name": "app-server-1", "address": "0.0.0.0", "enabled": true, "weight": 0.56, "header": { "Host": [ "example.com" ] } } ], "origin_steering": { "policy": "random" }, "notification_filter": { "origin": { "disable": false, "healthy": null }, "pool": { "disable": false, "healthy": null } } }}
After creating the pool, you would also want to create a new notification with the following parameters specified:
"alert_type": "load_balancing_health_alert","filters": { "pool_id": <<ARRAY_OF_INCLUDED_POOL_IDS>>, "new_health"
…(内容过长已截断)

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