Cloudflare on mobile: when the dashboard is enough, and when an app helps.

Looking is most of the job

When an alert arrives on a Saturday, the first questions are rarely about changing anything. Is the zone up? Did traffic drop everywhere or only in one country? Is the Worker throwing errors, and did anyone deploy or change a record in the last hour? A phone answers all of these well, because they are read-only and quick to check.

In Clouder, that means the Overview's traffic map and zone analytics, a real-time tail of the Worker in question, and the audit log of who changed what. Most incidents get their explanation from those screens before anyone touches a setting.

Dashboard or app

There are two ways to reach Cloudflare from a phone: the Cloudflare dashboard at dash.cloudflare.com in a mobile browser, or an app built on the Cloudflare API. Cloudflare makes the dashboard. Clouder is an independent app made by Layton Labs, one option among the apps that use the API.

For a one-off check, or a setting Clouder does not cover, open the dashboard. For alerts, quick fixes and anything you do on a phone more than once, an app is faster and keeps your Cloudflare password out of the picture. Many people use both: the app for the first five minutes, the dashboard when they are back at a desk. Clouder runs on iPhone and iPad and on Android.

Changes that suit a phone

Good phone changes are small, specific and easy to undo. You know exactly what the result should look like, and you can check it from the same phone a minute later.

• Correcting the value of one DNS record, or flipping its proxy status
• Raising the security level, or switching on Under Attack mode during an attack
• Purging the cache after a hotfix
• Blocking an abusive IP range or ASN with an IP access rule
• Switching off a WAF rule that blocks legitimate visitors
• Pausing a health check that is paging you for planned maintenance

Changes that can wait for a laptop

Anything large, hard to verify or impossible to undo deserves a keyboard, a second screen and a calmer moment.

• Reworking many DNS records at once, unless you import them from a zone file you prepared
• Deleting buckets, databases or whole domains
• DROP TABLE, or a DELETE you have not tested
• Deploying Worker code that has not been reviewed and tested
• Access policy changes that could lock your team out

Clouder helps with the first kind and slows down the second. Deleting a domain asks you to type its name, the agent asks before every write, and with Clouder Pro read-only mode stays on until you switch it off.

Set up access you can live with

The safest phone setup is one where losing the phone is an inconvenience, not an incident. Give the app a token that can do what you need and no more, protect the phone with a passcode and Face ID or a fingerprint, and know where to revoke access.

Clouder either creates a scoped token for each device from a Manager token you provide, or works with a token you scoped yourself. Either way, the token is listed in your Cloudflare dashboard, and deleting it ends access at once. The security page walks through both options.

Hear about problems first

A phone is only useful for incidents if it tells you about them. Turn on push notifications for the events you care about and keep the rest quiet with notification policies. With Clouder Pro, live incidents add anomaly detection, a timeline and one-tap mitigations, shown as a Live Activity on an iPhone's Lock Screen or as an ongoing notification on Android. More on alerts and incidents.

A short checklist

• The token on your phone covers what you need and nothing more
• Read-only mode stays on until you mean to change something
• Alerts are on for the events that matter, and off for the rest
• Your important zones have a recent zone file export
• You know where to delete the token if the phone goes missing