Cloudflare introduces Traces in open beta to follow requests across entire platform

Cloudflare has introduced Cloudflare Traces in open beta, extending automatic tracing beyond Workers to the entire request path. This long-term investment in OpenTelemetry allows users to view supported security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution, and origin handling in a single trace.

End-to-End Visibility

The platform captures supported operations in one request-level timeline without additional setup. Users can investigate specific questions, such as why a request was blocked by a security rule, whether a URL was rewritten by a Transform Rule, or if a response was served from cache. For example, nested spans can reveal that a cache miss resulted in spending 527ms of a 539ms total request time getting a response from the origin.

Configuration and Control

Tracing is enabled on any domain with no special instrumentation required. Users can set a baseline sampling rate to balance visibility and cost, then use Trace Rules to override it for specific traffic. This allows capturing 100% of traces for a specific customer or debug header while keeping the rest of the traffic at a low baseline, such as 1%.

Integration and Export

Cloudflare Traces supports W3C traceparent headers, enabling true distributed tracing by accepting context from incoming requests and forwarding it to origins. Spans can be exported via OTLP to any compatible observability platform. Additionally, the Cloudflare Observability MCP server allows coding agents to query traces using the SQL API to debug production issues by comparing failed and successful requests.

Pricing and Future Plans

Pricing is based on data ingestion and retention, not span count, under the unified Cloudflare Observability model. New pricing takes effect on December 1, 2026. The Free plan includes 0.5 GB of ingestion per day with 7 days retention, while Paid and Enterprise plans include 50 GB of ingestion and 10 GB-month of storage per billing cycle. Future updates will include broader automatic instrumentation for DDoS rules and Access, authenticated context propagation, and longer retention up to 365 days.