Cloudflare opens Traces beta and switches Workers Tracing to volume-based pricing
The beta gives teams a wider OpenTelemetry view of request handling, while pricing for existing tracing users changes on December 1, 2026.
Cloudflare has put Traces into open beta, giving developers a request-level OpenTelemetry timeline that now covers more of the proxy path, including security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution, and origin handling. The feature accepts and forwards W3C trace context, exports to OTLP backends, and lets teams control capture with a baseline sampling rate plus Trace Rules that can target specific traffic. The bigger change for existing users is pricing: starting December 1, 2026, Workers Tracing moves from per-span billing to volume-based charges for ingested data and retention, with the free tier including 0.5GB per day and paid tiers including 50GB of ingestion and 10GB-month of storage per billing cycle. Cloudflare also says broader automatic instrumentation, authenticated context propagation, ad hoc tracing, and OpenTelemetry API support in Workers are planned but not yet available.
Why it matters
Teams using Cloudflare Traces can now see more of the proxy path in one request-level timeline, which makes tracing more complete across traffic handling and Worker execution. For current customers, the bigger practical change is that Workers Tracing will no longer be billed per span; costs will be tied to data volume and retention from December 1, 2026, with new limits on free and paid plans.
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Sources
- InfoQ