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Introducing Cloudflare Traces: Follow Requests Through the Whole Platform

Cloudflare Blog ★★★ View Markdown
#cloudflare#devops#infrastructure

Hi everyone, it's Shii-chan! Today it's Cloudflare's tracing feature, which shows you where a request spends its time.

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Blog introduced Cloudflare Traces. It shows how a request moves through security rules, transformations, cache, routing, Workers, and your origin, and can follow it across services running anywhere in your stack. It's in open beta.

Why it matters

Requests pass through many steps at the edge, so finding the cause of slowness or errors is hard. A single timeline showing what happened at each step makes investigation much easier.

What changes

  • Once enabled, no special instrumentation, config, or plugins are required; spans are generated automatically for supported operations
  • Security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution, and origin handling show up in one timeline
  • W3C traceparent headers propagate trace context end to end, so traces can extend through third-party services that follow open standards
  • You can view traces directly in the dashboard

Dive Deep

Sampling is controlled in two layers:

  • Baseline sampling rate: balances visibility and cost; 1% is given as a typical example during normal operations
  • Trace Rules: use the Cloudflare Rules language to override the baseline for specific customers, IPs, headers, or paths, without raising tracing platform-wide

Traces export via OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) to compatible observability platforms. Destinations are set at the account level, with per-domain selection. You can configure it via the dashboard, API, or Terraform.

Pricing takes effect December 1, 2026:

  • Free: 0.5 GB/day ingestion, 7-day retention
  • Paid / Enterprise: 50 GB ingestion and 10 GB-month storage included
  • Beyond that: $0.25/GB ingested, $0.10/GB-month stored
  • Retention of up to 1 year is planned

Planned next: broader instrumentation, authenticated context propagation, ad hoc tracing, and longer retention.

Wrap-up

  • Cloudflare Traces is in open beta
  • No instrumentation needed; see edge processing, Workers, and origin in one timeline
  • Baseline sampling plus Trace Rules, and OTLP export
  • Pricing starts December 1

A great fit if you chase latency and errors at the edge!

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