Monocle Overview
Monocle is a lightweight utility that identifies anonymised traffic — including VPNs, proxies, and datacenter connections — and provides insight into how users are connecting to your application.
It is most commonly implemented using a client-side JavaScript snippet, but can also be integrated with backend and edge-based workflows for more advanced use cases.
Monocle runs passively, allowing you to analyse traffic quality without interrupting the user experience.
What Monocle Does
Monocle gives you visibility into traffic quality and behaviour, including:
- Identification of anonymised traffic such as VPNs, proxies, and datacenter connections
- Detection of potentially risky or non-genuine traffic patterns
- Real-time insights into traffic distribution and behaviour
- Contextual data to support monitoring and policy decisions
How Monocle Works
- Integrate Monocle into your application (typically via a JavaScript snippet)
- Monocle generates an encrypted assessment for each session
- Traffic insights are surfaced in the Monocle Dashboard
- Optionally, assessments can be sent to your backend or evaluated using policies
Using Monocle
Once integrated, Monocle can be used to:
- Monitor anonymised and non-anonymised traffic
- Identify unusual patterns or spikes in activity
- Understand geographic and service-level traffic distribution
- Inform how traffic should be handled
Monitoring and Enforcement
Monocle supports both monitoring and enforcement use cases.
- Monitoring – Observe and analyse traffic without taking action
- Enforcement – Use Monocle assessments or policy decisions to determine how traffic should be handled
In most integrations, Monocle evaluates traffic and returns a decision (such as allow or deny), which your own infrastructure enforces.
For supported edge integrations (such as Cloudflare), Monocle can enforce these decisions directly.