Introducing Cloudflare Traces: follow requests through our entire platform

This post introduces Cloudflare Traces, a new open beta feature that extends automatic tracing beyond Workers to the entire request path across Cloudflare's platform. It enables users to see supported security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution, and origin handling within a single request-level timeline. Key capabilities include automatic span generation for supported platform operations, control over tracing via sampling rates and Trace Rules, end-to-end context propagation using W3C traceparent headers, in-dashboard trace investigation, and export of traces via OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) to compatible observability platforms. This significantly enhances end-to-end visibility for debugging and understanding request behavior across Cloudflare's infrastructure and customer stacks.