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Test your first application

After you have secured your application with policies, you can verify that your policies are working correctly to avoid unexpected connection issues for end-users and subsequent IT ticket burden for administrators.

Test your application performance

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) provides visibility into device, network, and application performance across your Zero Trust organization.

With DEX, you can monitor the state of your WARP client deployment and resolve issues impacting end-user productivity. DEX is designed for IT and security teams who need to proactively monitor and troubleshoot device and network health across distributed environments. DEX is available on all Cloudflare Zero Trust and SASE plans.

Using DEX, you can:

DEX tests and other measurement features are only available for devices that have WARP installed.

Configure a DEX test

You will test your first application using a DEX HTTP test.

An HTTP test sends a GET request from an end-user device to a specific web application. You can use the response metrics to troubleshoot connectivity issues. For example, you can check whether the application is inaccessible for all users in your organization, or only certain ones.

To set up an HTTP test for an application:

  1. In Zero Trust ↗, go to DEX > Tests.
  2. Select Add a Test.
  3. Fill in the following fields:
    • Name: Enter any name for the test.
    • Target: Enter the URL of the website or application that you want to test (for example, https://wiki.internal.com). Both public and private hostnames are supported. If testing a private hostname, ensure that the domain is on your local domain fallback list.
    • Source device profiles: (Optional) Select the WARP device profiles that you want to run the test on. If no profiles are selected, the test will run on all supported devices connected to your Zero Trust organization.
    • Test type: Select HTTP Get.
    • Test frequency: Specify how often the test will run. Input a minute value between 5 and 60.
  4. Select Add test.

You can turn off this test later to prevent it from rerunning by going to DEX > Tests in Zero Trust ↗ and disabling the toggle under Status.

View test results

View test results for all devices

To view an overview of test results for all devices:

  1. In Zero Trust ↗, go to DEX > Monitoring.
  2. Select the Tests tab.
  3. Under Application tests, select a test to view detailed results.

View test results for an individual device

To view analytics on a per-device level:

  1. In Zero Trust ↗, go to My Team > Devices.
  2. Select the device you want to view, and then select View details.
  3. Select the Tests tab.
  4. Select a test to view detailed results.

Analyze test results

An HTTP test measures the following data:

DataDescription
Resource fetch timeTotal time of all steps of the request, measured from startTime to responseEnd ↗.
Server response timeRound-trip time for the device to receive a response from the target.
DNS response timeRound-trip time for the DNS query to resolve.
HTTP status codesStatus code ↗ returned by the target.

A successful HTTP Status Code (for example, 200 OK) will confirm that the end user device traffic successfully passed your entire Zero Trust security posture and reached the application's origin. If the test returns a failure code (like 403 Forbidden), the Access policies are working to block an unauthorized request, and you will need to audit which Access policy is denying the end user access.

// Need steps on how to do this.

For performance, you track the time it took for the request to complete, starting with the DNS Response Time. This is critical because your Gateway DNS policy is the very first enforcement gate, so this metric tells you the overhead introduced by Cloudflare resolving the hostname and evaluating the policy's identity checks.

Next, the Server Response Time helps isolate any latency issues to the network path or the application's back-end.

Finally, the Resource Fetch Time is the total time elapsed for the entire test, giving you the conclusive, single metric for the actual end-user experience, which should be low and stable to confirm a successful deployment.

// Need explanation for what real world consequences performance metrics have on user exp