Choose the tool for the bottleneck
Use Argo Smart Routing for unreliable or slow network paths, Tiered Cache to reduce repeated cache misses reaching an origin, Load Balancing to steer between origin pools, Health Checks to determine origin availability and Waiting Rooms to admit demand gradually. These products solve different problems and are not substitutes for origin capacity planning.
Argo Smart Routing
Argo measures network conditions and chooses an efficient path across Cloudflare's network for eligible traffic. Compare end-to-end latency and error rate before and after activation over representative regions. It cannot repair slow application code or an overloaded origin.
Tiered Cache
Tiered Cache lets lower-tier locations ask selected upper tiers for cached content before contacting the origin, reducing origin connections and bandwidth. Measure origin request count and cache-hit behaviour. Dynamic or explicitly uncacheable responses still reach the origin.
Health Checks and Load Balancing
A health check needs a stable protocol, hostname, path, expected status and timing that represent real service health. Avoid a shallow endpoint that stays healthy while the application is unusable. Test failover deliberately and ensure every pool can carry the expected traffic.
Waiting Rooms
Set total active users and new users per minute from measured application capacity, not guesswork. Define which path is protected and test session, cookie and queue behaviour before an event. A waiting room protects admission but does not increase origin capacity.
Observe commercial usage
Some traffic products are paid add-ons or usage-based. Confirm the contracted unit, included allowance and expected traffic before activation. Use Silurian billing as the commercial record; provider traffic counters remain operational evidence.
Recover from a traffic change
Restore the previous routing, tiering, pool or admission state and verify origin traffic returns to its expected path. Keep health checks running long enough to distinguish a transient failure from a persistent fault. Do not remove the last healthy origin while testing.
