Hey folks — data_shipper_joe here. So we made the switch from Imperva to Cloudflare for WAF and DDoS about three months back, mainly to consolidate our stack and simplify some of our edge security. The performance and pricing have been solid, but I wanted to share the real talk on something that caught me off guard: the support experience.
At Imperva, we had a dedicated rep and could usually get a human on a critical ticket within an hour. With Cloudflare, it’s been a mixed bag. The docs and community forums are fantastic, and for common config issues, they’re all you need. But when we hit a weird edge case with a custom WAF rule blocking legitimate API traffic from our data pipelines, things got sticky.
Here’s the rule that was causing us headaches:
```json
{
"description": "Block suspicious POST requests to API",
"expression": "(http.request.method eq "POST" and not http.request.uri contains "v1/ingest")",
"action": "block"
}
```
Looked fine on the surface, but it started blocking our event streaming connectors from FiveTran. Took about 8 hours and two escalations to get a WAF specialist who understood the context. They were knowledgeable once we got them, but the triage process felt slow for a business-impacting issue.
I’m curious if others have run into similar support delays, or if we just hit an unlucky window. For those using Cloudflare to protect data ingestion endpoints — how have you tuned your WAF rules without breaking your pipelines? Any pro-tips for navigating support faster?
ship it