Cloudflare said on October 2, 2026 that it is introducing Cloudflare Traces in open beta, extending automatic tracing beyond its Workers platform to the rest of the request path. The company said the service is available from the dashboard, through the API, or with Terraform.
What Cloudflare is launching
According to Cloudflare, a single trace can show supported security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution and origin handling, and can then be continued through services running on Cloudflare, at an origin, or elsewhere in a customer's stack.
The company described the release as "a long-term investment in OpenTelemetry and in making Cloudflare the most observable part of your stack." It said Workers Tracing, which added automatic instrumentation for Worker invocations including outbound fetches and calls to KV, R2, D1, Durable Objects and other Workers, was its first step toward exposing what happens on the platform.
Cloudflare said no special instrumentation, configuration or plugins are required: once tracing is enabled for a domain, spans are generated automatically.
Sampling, Trace Rules and context propagation
Customers can enable tracing on any domain and set a baseline sampling rate to balance visibility, data volume and cost, Cloudflare said, giving the example of tracing 1% of requests during normal operation.
Trace Rules can override that baseline for matching traffic. Cloudflare said a customer could trace 100% of traffic for a single hostname, source IP or identifying request header, or 100% of requests carrying a temporary debug header, while leaving other traffic at 1%. The rules use the same Cloudflare Rules language, so they can target paths, methods, headers, IP addresses, geographies or combinations.
The company said Cloudflare Traces can accept a W3C traceparent header from an incoming request, with an incoming propagation policy controlling whether that context is accepted, and can forward a new traceparent header to the origin. Spans can be exported over OTLP to a compatible observability platform by configuring an account-level destination and choosing which domains send traces to it.
Cloudflare also said its Observability MCP server lets a coding agent query traces through the company's SQL API, compare failed traces with successful ones and connect findings to repository code.
Pricing and roadmap
Cloudflare said Traces will be part of a unified Cloudflare Observability pricing model based on how much observability data is ingested and how long it is retained, rather than on the number of spans or events. The new pricing takes effect across Cloudflare Tracing and Workers Tracing starting December 1, 2026.
Under the published plans, the Free tier includes 0.5 GB of ingestion per day with 7 days of retention and no additional usage available. Paid and Enterprise plans include 50 GB of ingestion and 10 GB-month of storage per billing cycle, retention of up to 1 year marked "coming soon", and additional usage at $0.25 per GB ingested and $0.10 per GB-month stored.
After the open beta, the company said it plans broader automatic instrumentation across the HTTP request path and the Workers execution path, authenticated context propagation, ad hoc tracing, OpenTelemetry API support in Workers, and retention of trace data for up to 365 days.
What to do
- Follow the Cloudflare Traces documentation to trace a first request and tune sampling with Trace Rules, as the company recommends.
- Enable tracing in the Cloudflare dashboard on a domain, or use the API or Terraform; Cloudflare says an agent can also set it up.
- Set a baseline sampling rate to balance visibility, data volume and cost, then use Trace Rules to capture 100% of traffic for a specific hostname, IP or debug header during an investigation.
- Configure an account-level OTLP destination and choose which domains send traces to it if you want Cloudflare spans alongside the rest of your telemetry.
Key facts and where they come from
- Cloudflare Traces is launching in open beta and extends tracing beyond Workers.
Today, we’re introducing Cloudflare Traces in open beta, extending automatic tracing beyond Workers to the rest of the request path.
- The service can accept and forward W3C traceparent headers.
End-to-end trace context propagation: Accept and forward W3C traceparent headers
- Spans can be exported to any OTLP-compatible endpoint.
Export traces with OpenTelemetry: Send your spans to any destination with a compatible Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) endpoint.
- Pricing is based on ingestion and retention, effective December 1, 2026.
New pricing will take effect across Cloudflare Tracing (and Workers Tracing!) starting December 1, 2026.
- Free plan includes 0.5 GB ingestion per day with 7 days of retention.
Free
0.5 GB of ingestion per day
7 Days
Not available - Paid and Enterprise additional usage is $0.25 per GB ingested and $0.10 per GB-month stored.
$0.25 per GB ingested
$0.10 per GB-month stored - No additional instrumentation is needed once tracing is enabled for a domain.
There is no special instrumentation, config, or plugins required. Once tracing is enabled for a domain, Cloudflare generates these spans automatically.