Cloudflare Exporter underreports requests compare to Cloudflare dashboard

[soontobemil]

Description

The Cloudflare exporter on prometheus is consistently reporting ~25% fewer requests compared to the Cloudflare Dashboard for the same time periods. This appears to be caused by multiple architectural issues in how the exporter queries and processes metrics.

Environment

• Cloudflare Plan: Pro/Enterprise
• Scrape Interval: 60 seconds
• Scrape Delay: 300 seconds (5 minutes)

Expected Behavior

Prometheus metrics from cloudflare_zone_requests_total should match the "Total Requests" shown in the Cloudflare Dashboard for the same time period (accounting for the 5-minute scrape delay).

Actual Behavior

Prometheus consistently shows ~25% fewer requests than the Cloudflare Dashboard.

Example:

• Cloudflare Dashboard (30-minute period): 192-215 requests
• Prometheus (same period): 150-180 requests
• Discrepancy: ~25-30% missing data

Screenshots

• Total Request of 22.03M between 9:00-9:30

• Total Request of 18.8M-ish between 9:00-9:30 (Via thanos/prometheus)
• sum(increase(cloudflare_zone_requests_total{zone="example.com"}[30m]))

*Both data was captured at 10:30 - so this should have given enough time for the scraped metrics to settle in.

Reproduction Steps

1. Deploy cloudflare-exporter with default configuration (60s interval, 300s delay)
2. Let it run for at least 1 hour
3. Compare Prometheus metrics with Cloudflare Dashboard for the same time period:
   sum(increase(cloudflare_zone_requests_total{zone="example.com"}[30m]))
4. Check Cloudflare Dashboard "Total Requests" for the same 30-minute window (accounting for 5-minute offset)
5. Observe ~20-30% discrepancy

Please advise, thank you!

[soontobemil]

Anyone prob has an idea or answer on this?