Cloudflare has moved its Traces service into open beta, automatically converting traffic that passes through Workers, security rules, transformations, cache, routing, and origin handling into OpenTelemetry spans. Engineers gain end‑to‑end visibility across the entire proxy layer, while the shift to volume‑based pricing forces a rethink of cost and sampling strategies.
Extended Span Coverage
The beta expands automatic tracing beyond the edge compute layer (Workers) to include every major component of Cloudflare’s proxy stack. Each request now generates spans for security rule evaluation, transformation steps, cache lookups, routing decisions, and origin fetches, all reported in the OpenTelemetry format.
Traceparent Propagation and Targeted Sampling
Traces will accept incoming traceparent headers conforming to the W3C specification and forward them downstream, preserving correlation across services. The new Trace Rules feature lets operators define sampling criteria, enabling focused data collection on specific traffic patterns or endpoints without overwhelming storage.
Pricing Shift to Ingestion and Retention Volume
Effective 1 December, Cloudflare’s pricing model for Traces changes from a flat or request‑based fee to charges based on the amount of data ingested and retained. This aligns cost with actual observability volume and makes it essential to monitor trace generation rates, especially now that more components emit spans.
Related CloudNinjas coverage: DevOps.
What This Means For Practitioners
Teams should update their observability pipelines to ingest the broader set of OpenTelemetry spans and verify that existing back‑ends can handle the increased data rate. Evaluate Trace Rules to limit sampling to high‑value traffic and avoid unexpected cost spikes. Finally, incorporate volume monitoring into budgeting processes to track ingestion and retention usage from the start of the beta.
