Introducing Observatory and Smart Shield — see how the world sees your website, and make it faster in one click

According to Cloudflare, the company is launching Observatory in open beta alongside Smart Shield, with both products available today across all subscription tiers. Observatory unifies real-user data, synthetic testing, error rates and backend telemetry to give a complete health picture and guidance on how to improve performance and resilience, with real-user data (RUM) available by default for all free zones except EU or UK visitors.

The rollout leverages data from over 20% of the web, and includes two synthetic test types: browser tests using Lighthouse and a new network test that records wait time, server response time, connect time, SSL negotiation time and total load time.

The article notes concrete performance insights, such as 9 billion data points showing roughly 91.7% of pages served from Cloudflare’s cache achieving a good TTFB versus 79.7% from origin, and claims of reducing origin connections by over 30%—translated into about 402 years of handshake time saved per day. Smart Shield then automates origin protection and ties into Observatory to provide actionable, one-click fixes, with more updates planned for early 2026.