Cloudflare has opened Traces in beta, giving developers one timeline for the work its network performs between an incoming request and an application. Security checks, URL transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution and origin handling appear as OpenTelemetry spans without custom instrumentation.
That fills a gap in distributed tracing. A team can see which rule blocked a request, whether a transformation changed its URL and how much time was spent waiting for the origin. Cloudflare accepts the standard W3C trace context from upstream services and can pass a new context to the origin, allowing its spans to join a larger end-to-end trace.
Sampling uses configurable rules. Teams can keep a low baseline, then capture every request matching a customer hostname, path, source address or temporary debugging header. Spans export through the OpenTelemetry protocol to compatible observability services. Coding agents can also query the data through Cloudflare’s observability MCP server and compare failed traces with successful ones.
Pricing changes on December 1 from per-span billing to data volume and retention. The free plan includes 0.5 GB of ingestion per day and seven-day retention; paid plans include larger allowances before usage charges. Coverage is not complete yet: DDoS rules, Access and several Workers products are among the planned additions. The beta is available through the dashboard, API or Terraform.