CLOUDFLARE has announced the open beta of Cloudflare Traces, extending automatic tracing beyond Workers to the entire request path across its platform. In a single trace, users can view supported platform operations—security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution, and origin handling—and then follow the trace through services on Cloudflare, at the origin, or elsewhere in the stack. The move is pitched as a long‑term investment in OpenTelemetry, aiming to make Cloudflare the most observable part of a user’s stack.
The product enables automatic tracing across Cloudflare with no extra setup, while giving users control over what is traced via a baseline sampling rate and Trace Rules to override sampling for specific traffic. It supports end‑to‑end trace context propagation through traceparent headers and allows viewing of traces in the Cloudflare dashboard, with the option to export traces to any OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) destination.
The article notes that tracing can be enabled domain‑wide, and that Cloudflare can forward trace context to origins, enabling a unified view when combined with OTLP backends. Pricing is announced as part of the unified Cloudflare Observability model, with open beta pricing effective from 1 December 2026; plans include Free, Paid, and Enterprise with varying ingestion, retention, and storage limits.
Looking ahead, Cloudflare outlines planned expansions such as broader instrumentation, authenticated context propagation, ad hoc tracing, and longer retention.