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Cloudflare opens tracing beyond Workers and sets a per-gigabyte price that starts in December
Cloudflare Traces is in open beta today and records a span for every supported step a request takes through security rules, cache, routing, Workers and the origin, with W3C traceparent headers in and out and paid pricing starting 1 December.
Image: Cloudflare
Why it mattersA team that already runs OpenTelemetry at the origin can now join those traces to what Cloudflare did in front of them, so a slow page can be blamed on a specific WAF rule or cache miss instead of guessed at from logs.
A slow page served through Cloudflare used to split the investigation in two. The origin had its own traces, from whatever OpenTelemetry setup the team runs, and Cloudflare had a separate pile of logs and rule evaluations that did not join up. The team's best guess at where the time went was often the right starting point, and sometimes the wrong one, and nobody could prove either until the fix shipped.
Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Traces today in open beta. The product records a span for every supported step a request takes through its network: security rules, URL transforms, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution and the connection to the origin. The company says there is no instrumentation or configuration to add on a domain beyond turning tracing on.
It joins the traces you already have
The piece that makes this useful outside Cloudflare is W3C traceparent header handling, in both directions. Cloudflare accepts a traceparent on an incoming request and attaches its own spans to that trace. It can also send a traceparent to the origin, so the origin's own spans continue the same trace. Spans export over OTLP to any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend, which puts the Cloudflare spans beside the ones a team already collects.
A trace rule can override the baseline sampling rate for a specific hostname, header or IP, which Cloudflare suggests using to trace all of one customer's traffic during an incident while leaving everyone else at a baseline of one percent.
The price starts in December
Cloudflare says a new unified observability price takes effect on 1 December 2026 and covers both Cloudflare Traces and the existing Workers Tracing product. The free plan includes 0.5 GB of ingestion a day with seven days of retention. Paid and Enterprise plans include 50 GB of ingestion and 10 GB-month of storage in each billing cycle, then 25 cents per gigabyte ingested and 10 cents per gigabyte-month stored. Cloudflare says a year of retention is coming.
A separate paragraph in the post says the Cloudflare Observability MCP server will let a coding agent query traces through the SQL API, compare failing requests to passing ones and connect what the trace shows to the lines of code that produced the request. Whether an agent is the right thing to turn loose on production telemetry is still a judgment call for the team, but it is now one agents can do.
The piece a team gets on day one is a request-level timeline for traffic they could already see parts of. The piece worth watching is how often the new spans change the answer that the on-call engineer would have reached from logs alone.
Source
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