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Cloudflare Traces Enters Open Beta With OTLP Export, and Observability Pricing Changes on December 1

Cloudflare Traces records spans for security rules, caching, routing, Workers and origin handling. New volume-based observability pricing starts December 1, 2026.

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Overview

Cloudflare has introduced Cloudflare Traces in open beta, extending automatic tracing beyond Workers to the rest of the request path, according to the Cloudflare Blog. The company says the service is available from the dashboard, through the API, or with Terraform, and can export to an OTLP destination. The launch came with a new volume-based observability pricing model that, per Cloudflare’s companion announcement, takes effect December 1, 2026.

What Cloudflare Traces Does

Per the launch post, Cloudflare Traces “records each supported step as a span, including its timing, outcome, and relevant attributes.” The post says a single trace can show supported security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution and origin handling. Cloudflare says that once tracing is enabled for a domain, it generates these spans automatically, with no special instrumentation, config or plugins required.

The post gives several examples of questions a trace can answer, including which security rule blocked or challenged a request and whether a Transform Rule rewrote the URL before it reached the application. In one example, Cloudflare describes a cache miss that went to origin and spent 527ms of the 539ms getting a response.

Cloudflare positions the product as an extension of Workers Tracing. The company says it launched automatic instrumentation for Worker invocations last year, and that Traces aims to bring similar visibility to anyone using Cloudflare, including those who only have Cloudflare in front of an origin.

Sampling, Trace Rules and Propagation

Users set a baseline sampling rate per domain. The post suggests tracing 1% of requests during normal operation. Trace Rules can then override that rate for matching traffic, such as tracing 100% of traffic for a specific hostname, source IP or identifying request header while leaving everyone else at 1%. Trace Rules use the same Cloudflare Rules language, so they can target paths, methods, headers, IP addresses, geographies, or combinations of those properties.

For distributed tracing, Cloudflare says Traces can accept a W3C traceparent header from an incoming request, so Cloudflare spans can join a trace that began upstream, and can forward a new traceparent header to the origin. Spans can be exported over OTLP to a compatible observability platform; an account-level destination is configured first, and then domains are chosen to send traces to it. Cloudflare also says its Observability MCP server lets coding agents query traces through a SQL API.

Pricing Starting December 1

According to the launch post, new pricing takes effect across Cloudflare Tracing and Workers Tracing starting December 1, 2026. Cloudflare says the model charges based on how much observability data is ingested and how long it is retained, instead of by the number of spans or events.

  • Free plan: 0.5 GB of ingestion per day, 7-day retention, and additional usage not available.
  • Paid and Enterprise plans: 50 GB of ingestion and 10 GB-month of storage per billing cycle included, then $0.25 per GB ingested and $0.10 per GB-month stored. Retention is listed as up to 1 year, marked as coming soon.

The companion post says the same model applies across all plans from December 1, 2026, effective upon renewal for Enterprise customers, and also covers existing Developer Platform logs, including Workers, Containers and AI Gateway. In the same announcement, Cloudflare says Logpush, previously available only to Enterprise, is now available on all self-serve plans, with usage-based pricing of $0.03 per GB for exports to Cloudflare destinations and $0.10 per GB for external destinations after a 25 GB monthly allowance. It also says all plans now get 30 days of domain analytics.

What We Don’t Know

  • Cloudflare has not said when the beta will reach general availability.
  • The roadmap includes broader instrumentation (DDoS rules and Access on the HTTP path; Workflows, Queues and Pipelines on the Workers path), authenticated context propagation, ad hoc tracing, OpenTelemetry API support in Workers and retention up to 365 days. No dates are given for these.
  • The posts do not say how many existing Workers Observability users will pay more under the new model, since that depends on each account’s log and trace volume.

Analysis

For teams already running OpenTelemetry backends, the main practical change is that Cloudflare’s edge processing can now appear as spans in the same trace as application telemetry, provided both are sent to one OpenTelemetry-compatible backend, as the launch post describes. The pricing shift is the item with a hard date: accounts with sizable Workers logs or traces will be billed by ingested and stored gigabytes from December 1, 2026.