What's new on redirection.io?

Discover the latest news of our platform, improvements and important announcements.

Enhanced Security Settings for Organization Access

New improvements have been made to the security settings for organization administrators, providing greater control over how members can access your organization. Org admins now have the ability to restrict and fine-tune which authentication methods are allowed, enhancing both security and compliance.

The organization security settings

What’s New?

  • More Control Over Authentication Methods: While two-factor authentication (2FA) could previously be enforced for email/password logins since several years, admins can now restrict access by disabling specific authentication methods like Google or Microsoft auth—or even disabling external providers entirely.
  • Flexible Security Policies: For organizations with strict security policies, you can now easily tailor which authentication methods are authorized. For example, you can require members to sign in only through enterprise SSO, or block certain options like email/password authentication.
  • Improved Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Management: You can still enforce 2FA across all users.

These changes are designed to provide more granular control over access to your organization's data and ensure compliance with your security policies. You can find these settings under the "Security" tab in your Organization Settings.

Check out the updated documentation about security settings for more details on how to manage these new security features.

Launching a New Manager Layout with Enhanced Navigation

We have launched today a brand-new navigation menu in the redirection.io manager! Starting today, you’ll notice a more compact, streamlined design that gives you quicker access to more features than ever before.

What’s New?

  • Direct Access to Key Features: Access your favorite tools like the "Log View" directly from the menu for improved efficiency.
  • Live Crawl Status: A discrete indicator will now show up in the menu when a crawl is in progress, so you’ll always be in the know.
  • Collapsible Menu: Need more space for your main content? The menu can now be collapsed, freeing up valuable screen real estate for a cleaner, more focused experience.

While this change might seem subtle, it’s packed with power. Features like Notifications, Segmentation, Marker Templates, and Log Views, which may have been overlooked before, are now more accessible and visible than ever.

Explore the new layout and discover tools you didn’t even know you had!

Introducing One-Click Testing for Your Entire Redirection Plan

We’re excited to announce a groundbreaking new feature within redirection.io: the ability to test all your redirection rules at once, with just a single click! This enhancement ensures that your redirect plan works exactly as expected, even when managing complex rulesets with tens of thousands of redirections. Whether you're launching a site migration, updating content, or refining your user experience, this tool offers unparalleled convenience, accuracy, and confidence.

Key Benefits at a Glance

  • Instant Validation: Ensure that all redirection rules work as intended without manual checking.
  • Scalability: Perfect for large-scale projects with extensive rule sets.
  • Proactive Error Detection: Identify potential conflicts or rule overrides before they affect your users.
  • Chains and Loops Dectection: Do not ship in production a redirections plan that contains redirect chains or, worse, loops.

Understanding the Power of Rule Testing in redirection.io

One of redirection.io's standout features is the ability to attach example requests to each rule you create. These examples allow you to test how each rule behaves in real-world scenarios before it goes live. During the rule creation process, the "Impact" step becomes crucial: redirection.io evaluates how the new rule interacts with all other rules in your set. This way, you can see how requests will be processed, whether they should trigger the rule, and what specific actions will be executed (e.g., a 301 redirect).

Example: Analyzing the Impact of a Rule

For example, say you're creating a rule to redirect https://example.com/shop/about to /buy/about. After setting up the rule and adding sample requests, the "Impact" table will show you whether the rule is triggered correctly and if any other existing rules are affected.

Here’s what you’ll see:

Impact results

This feature doesn’t just check if the new rule works; it also warns you about any potential rule conflicts, including cases where actions might be overridden by higher-priority rules. If there’s an error, like a redirection loop, redirection.io alerts you to correct it before going live.

👉 Read our documentation about the possible example matching statuses

How redirection.io Helps with Specific Request Testing

In addition to evaluating individual rules, redirection.io allows you to test specific requests against your entire ruleset. The “Test the Rules” feature lets you input a URL, add extra conditions like HTTP method or request headers, and see a detailed breakdown of which rules get triggered.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Navigate to the "Test the Rules" page.
  2. Enter the URL you want to analyze.
  3. Optionally, add advanced parameters like HTTP method or source IP address.
  4. Hit “Test this Request” to see which rules are activated and the actions they produce.

Testing a specific request is possible in redirection.io

This feature is invaluable when you're troubleshooting unexpected redirects or verifying that your rules handle specific requests correctly.

One-Click Testing for All Rules

For Pro Plan customers, redirection.io takes rule testing a step further with the "Test All Rules" feature. This feature is designed to validate every rule in your set, saving you time and effort, especially when working with large or complex rulesets.

Imagine you’ve set up thousands of rules and have just added a new one. You can now instantly check if this new rule will disrupt any previously established rules. With "Test All Rules," redirection.io will show you potential conflicts and errors, along with suggestions for resolving them.

Here’s an example of what you’ll see when an issue is detected:

An error is happening during the test of all rules

If your newly created rule affects any previously set rules, you’ll get a detailed breakdown of the problem. Once identified, you can resolve the conflict before deploying changes, guaranteeing that your entire redirection strategy remains intact.

Deploy with Confidence

Managing a large set of redirects has never been easier. With redirection.io’s suite of tools—including rule impact analysis, specific request testing, and one-click testing of your entire ruleset—you can deploy redirects confidently, knowing that everything will work as planned.

By leveraging these advanced testing capabilities, you avoid common issues such as broken redirects, rule overrides, and complex redirection loops. Whether you're working with a few rules or managing thousands, redirection.io ensures that you stay in control of your redirection strategy.

Start using this powerful feature today and elevate the way you manage redirects!

A series of improvements on the logs explorer

When it comes to collecting HTTP traffic logs, redirection.io is one of the best solutions on the market: once installed, you get all the HTTP traffic logs of your website in real time, and you can use them to analyze user behavior, monitor website performance, and debug issues.

Collecting logs has been one of redirection.io's core features since the beginning and we've been working hard to make it as efficient and reliable as possible. To achieve this, we have been using a lot of different technologies and experimenting with a lot of solutions. As a result, we have recently taken some steps towards making our logs feature the most efficient and reliable it can be and we thought it would be interesting to share the improvements with our community.

Introducing Log View Counters

Two years ago, we added the concept of "Logs views", which was an innovative way to save individual logs screen configurations as bookmarks, so that users could easily access their preffered view at all times. This feature became very popular, and many of our users utilize it to monitor specific parts of their website, or only a range of HTTP status codes, user agents, etc.

Since then, we've been thinking of interesting ways to go further and to add some kind of "counters" to the logs views allowing users to see the number of logs in each view more easily.

Today, we are enabling, for all our users, the new "Log View Counters" feature, which is a way to "pin" several clickable log view counters at the top of the logs screen, so that you can see the number of logs that match the log view. This is a very simple feature, but it is very useful, and we hope that it will help you to better understand your HTTP traffic logs.

Logs timeline navigation

Also, it is a shame that our logs GUI did not easily allow you to navigate in the logs history - this is now fixed and we have added "back" and "forward" buttons to the logs screen, so that you can easily navigate in the timeline.

New filters and aggregations

Some new filters and aggregations are available in the logs explorer, so that you can better understand your HTTP traffic logs. Of course, all these filters can be used in combination with log views, so you can prepare specific traffic views that match your business and your website structure.

For example, we have added the ability to filter logs by "Path" (see only the requests for which the path starts with /blog), "Referrer Host" (which domains to the visitors come from?) or "Query params" (did the URL of the request contain a query parameter?).

Customers using our fully managed instances or the redirection.io agent in reverse proxy mode can also display and filter requests by their "Duration", which is basically the time it took for the backend to process the request. This duration is measured at the redirection.io agent level, from the moment the agent receives the request to the moment it begins to send the response to the client. This is a very useful metric to monitor the performance of your website, and to detect slow pages. This metric can be used to inspect the performance of the redirection.io agent when it comes to performing redirections: most of the time, you should see a 0 ms. duration of such requests, as the agent is able to perform redirections almost instantly.

Faster logs exports

Since day one, we have allowed the export of traffic logs in CSV format. Recently, we've made several changes in our logs storage infrastructure which have resulted in a faster logs export feature. You can now export logs in a matter of seconds, even very large logs sets.

More logs per day

Historically, there has been a limit of 2 million rows per day (even for free projects), in order to avoid performance issues and offer a quality service to all our users. We've even allowed temporary bursts in order to accept traffic peaks. In the current situation, we collect and process every day several billions of HTTP requests.

Overquota logs being displayed

Since September 2023, we allow to extend the logs retention duration, so our customers can have an insight on their detailed logs for up to 12 weeks. This has been a great step forward for SEO consultants, as this allows them to cover a complete Googlebot exploration window and get clear insights of the traffic fixes priorities: which 404 errors did Googlebot encounter, which pages are the most crawled, where is the crawl budget consumed, etc.

However, we were still missing the ability to upper the amount of logs that can be loaded in a project each day. This was a bit problematic for some of our customers, who have very high traffic websites and who wanted to collect all the logs of their website - the over quota logs were dropped, and this was a bit frustrating as it translated into a flat traffic chart and eventually a loss in the traffic errors collection.

This is now a thing of the past, and "Pro" plan customers can now request higher daily traffic logs limits. We will not detail why collecting an exhaustive view of traffic logs is important from a SEO perspective, as this has already been covered in many other articles, but we are happy to offer this new feature to our customers.

👉 Please contact us if you wish to increase your daily logs quota.

We always love to hear from our customers, and we are always happy to help you to better understand your HTTP traffic logs. Please contact us if you have any questions, if you need some help to extract information from your logs or if you have ideas of features that you would like to see in redirection.io. We are working hard to improve the logs explorer and have many new improvements coming in the next months, so stay tuned!

Enhancing Security and Flexibility: Introducing Multiple Project Keys in redirection.io

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, safeguarding your online assets is of paramount importance. Whether you're protecting sensitive data, ensuring the privacy of your users, or simply maintaining control over your web services, having robust security measures in place is essential. That's why we're thrilled to introduce a new feature in our SaaS platform - Multiple Project Keys - designed to give you greater control and flexibility over your projects in redirection.io.

The Project Key: The Project Configuration Secret

Before diving into the new feature, let's first understand the significance of the "project key." This unique string is the linchpin of your redirection.io project. It's the secret sauce that binds an instance to a specific project, allowing it to access and interact with the associated rules and logs. By default, every project receives a project key, which you can directly use to configure your redirection.io agent instance. However, there are scenarios where having multiple project keys can be helpful.

Why Multiple Project Keys Matter

Here are a few compelling reasons why you might want to utilize multiple project keys:

  • Enhanced Security: If your project key becomes public knowledge, it could pose a significant risk. With multiple project keys, you can rotate or change keys as needed to maintain the utmost security.
  • Development-Production Segregation: To maintain a clear separation between development and production environments, you can use specific project keys for each. This way, your development team can work without access to the production project key, ensuring data integrity.
  • Key Expiration: Sometimes, you might want a project key to have a limited lifespan. With the option to set expiration dates on project keys, you can control when they stop working.

Introducing Multiple Project Keys

redirection.io now offers the capability to create as many project keys as you require. Each project key can be customized with a name, helping you clarify why it was created, and an optional expiration date, ensuring it ceases to work after a set time.

redirection.io project key management

Key Rotation for Improved Security

If you suspect that your project key has been compromised or simply want to enhance security, our platform makes it easy to rotate project keys. Here's how you can do it:

  1. Create a new perpetual project key that will serve as the replacement.
  2. Add an expiration date to the old project key, ensuring it will no longer function after that date.
  3. Update your instance configurations with the new project key.

The graphical interface also displays the last time a project key was used, allowing you to determine when it's safe to remove the old key. This way, you can rest assured that all your instances have been updated, and the old project key is no longer in use.

The introduction of Multiple Project Keys in redirection.io is a significant step forward. With this feature, you can enhance the security of your projects, maintain clear separations between environments, and have full control over the lifespan of your project keys. To learn more about this feature, check out our documentation about instances and project keys.

Negation Support for Method and Backend Response Status Code Triggers

We have recently improved the the redirection.io rules system by introducing negation support for the "Method" and "Backend Response Status Code" triggers, providing you with greater flexibility and control over rule execution.

In a redirection.io rule, Triggers define the conditions that incoming HTTP requests must meet for the rule to be applied. For example, the "Method" trigger filters requests based on the HTTP method used, while the "Backend Response Status Code" trigger allows you to restrict triggering based on the status code generated by your backend application.

With our latest update, you can now utilize negation for these triggers. For example, you can define rules that trigger when the HTTP method is not GET or POST, or when the backend response status code is not 200 or 301. This new capability enables you to refine your rule logic and execute specific actions based on negated conditions.

Method trigger with excluded values

The feature is immedialtely available for the customers who use our "hosted instances" or the managed Cloudflare workers. Other deployment modes (nginx or Apache modules, agent reverse proxy, manually added Cloudflare worker, Fastly Compute@Edge, etc.) needs to be updated to use at least the redirection.io agent 2.7.0 or libredirectionio 2.8.0.

To learn more about negation support and explore other features of the redirection.io rules system, refer to our documentation about triggers. We value your feedback and are continuously working to improve our services based on your needs. Thank you for choosing redirection.io as your trusted solution for efficient traffic management!

Introducing the Aggregated Logs Details Panel: Explore Your Traffic Logs with Ease!

We're pleased to announce the addition of the Aggregated Logs Details Panel to the redirection.io manager. This new feature brings convenience and efficiency to your analysis of HTTP traffic logs, allowing you to delve deeper into your most frequent requests.

In the logs screen of the manager, you can already group requests by various criteria like URL, HTTP method, response status code, and user agent. However, we've now made it even better by enabling the display of details for grouped requests.

For example, if you want to examine the most frequently requested URLs, simply group the requests by URL and click on a specific URL. You'll instantly access a comprehensive list of matching requests, complete with a preview of the most recent ones. You can easily navigate through these requests using the intuitive "next" and "previous" buttons.

This small yet handy feature provides valuable insights into your traffic logs, allowing you to quickly identify any issues or patterns. It's perfect for troubleshooting or conducting in-depth analysis.

We strive to make your experience with the redirection.io manager as seamless as possible, and Aggregated Logs Details is another step towards achieving that goal.

If you have any questions or need assistance, our support team is ready to help!

Manage your Sitemap with redirection.io

We are thrilled to announce a new feature in redirection.io that will make managing your sitemap.xml files easier than ever before. Our new "Sitemap management" feature is now available for "Pro" plan subscribers and allows you to define the content of your sitemap files directly within redirection.io.

Creating and managing sitemap files is an essential part of website management. However, it can often be a time-consuming and manual process, especially for larger websites. With our Sitemap management feature, you can avoid the need for developers to deploy a new version of the website every time a sitemap.xml file needs to be updated. This feature is useful in many professional contexts when the sitemap.xml management is not fully automated.

With the new redirection.io Sitemap action, you can easily define the content of your website's sitemap.xml file(s) directly from redirection.io, and serve it at the location specified in the "Source URL" trigger.

By using redirection.io to manage your sitemap files, you can improve your productivity and focus on more important tasks. This feature, combined with the redirection.io crawler, guarantees better reactivity and the ability to cover all the pages of your website, which in turn improves your website's SEO. Additionally, you can configure several sitemaps using this action, which is perfect for larger websites or for keeping sitemaps properly sorted.

To get started with Sitemap management in redirection.io, upgrade to our "Pro" plan today. And as always, let us know your thoughts and feedback! We're excited to see how this feature will help you better manage your website!

Logs views, a faster way to explore your traffic logs

While the redirection.io logs explorer is snappy and offers many options, it can become annoying to repeat the same filters configuration to get a specific report. For example, if your weekly website monitoring routine includes checking the HTTP errors found by search engines, you could end up being a bit fed up with configuring again and again the "Status code" and "User agent type" filters.

For such cases, we offer the "Logs views" feature. Logs views are a way to save a specific columns, filters and aggregation configuration, and to be able to reload this configuration with as few clicks as possible.

An example logs view, which allows to easily filter traffic logs with redirection.io

We already several predefined "Logs views" that address common analysis use cases:

  • All HTTP errors: This report displays the list of all HTTP errors (both 4xx and 5xx). Use this view to spot issues peaks during the last logging period.
  • Googlebot verified requests: This report lists all the requests that have been performed by Googlebot or any other Google-operated bot. We have validated this request and filtered out third-party bots pretending to be Googlebot.
  • Googlebot most common errors: This report shows the most common HTTP errors encountered by verified Googlebot on your website. Whenever possible, you should try to solve these issues by setting up a new redirect rule.
  • Fake Googlebot: Lists all requests that have been sent using the "Googlebot" User-Agent, but that we identified as obviously not initiated by Google services. It may be that these requests are performed by third-party bots that try to scrape some content from your website.
  • Most common HTTP errors: This report lists the top 100 most common HTTP errors (both 4xx and 5xx), grouped by URL and status code. The errors are sorted by occurrence count.
  • Top hit pages: Displays the most frequently hit URLs that serve html content.

You can also define your own log views, that will be saved at the project level, so you and your colleagues can use them.

Loading an existing "logs view" is a one-click operation:

  1. The gear wheel opens the logs views menu Hover the small gear wheel on the top right corner of the filters bar
  2. The logs views submenu Then, choose one of the displayed views, or hit the "Load another view" button.

📖 You can read the full documentation about log views in the dedicated part of our user documentation.

Enforce Two-factor authentication in your organization

A few weeks ago, we have enabled two-factor authentication for all redirection.io customer accounts. While this feature has been fairly successful, we have found that helping to improve the security of user accounts was not enough. Some redirection.io customers have organization with dozens of users, and one single compromised account or password could result in the leakage of company sensitive data - traffic statistics, configured rules, etc.

So starting today, we're giving organization administrators a way to strengthen access to their organization's projects, by making a new security setting available. Organization administrators can now require all organization users to enable Two-factor authentication on their personal accounts.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is what it looks like:

The setting to require 2FA for all organization users

You can find detailed explanations in the documentation about Organizations.