Engineering Team Scrapped Cloudflare Path for Internal Prometheus Metrics Over VPC
A software team running two DigitalOcean droplets in the same VPC initially routed internal Prometheus metrics scrapes through Cloudflare, a WAF, and OAuth token minting — adding unnecessary complexity to a private network task. The setup worked but forced every 30-second scrape to traverse multiple TLS handshakes and public infrastructure just to move roughly 80 KB of data between adjacent servers. About a month after deployment, the team noticed both droplets shared the same private VPC subnet in DigitalOcean's nyc3 region, meaning a direct private-IP connection had always been available. They reconfigured Prometheus to scrape the API directly over the VPC using the private interface, removing Cloudflare from the path entirely while retaining OAuth enforcement at the application layer. The incident highlights how the architecturally obvious solution — routing internal traffic the same way as public traffic — can introduce avoidable overhead when simpler private networking options already exist.
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