Cloudflare has introduced Cloudflare Traces in open beta, a feature that extends automatic request tracing beyond Workers to cover the entire request path through its platform. For WordPress site owners and hosting professionals who rely on Cloudflare in front of their origin servers, this adds a new layer of visibility into exactly how requests are handled before they ever reach the application.
What Traces Covers
In a single trace, Cloudflare now captures supported security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution, and origin handling. That trace can also continue into services running elsewhere in a site’s stack, since Cloudflare supports accepting and forwarding W3C traceparent headers for true end-to-end distributed tracing.
Key capabilities include:
- Automatic tracing across Cloudflare’s platform with no additional setup required
- Trace Rules to control which requests are traced, using the same Cloudflare Rules language for targeting paths, methods, headers, IPs, or geographies
- Trace context propagation to join requests to a trace that began before reaching Cloudflare, and to forward context onward to an origin
- Dashboard investigation of request timelines and span details directly in Cloudflare
- OpenTelemetry export of spans to any OTLP-compatible destination
Why This Matters for Site Operators
Previously, diagnosing why a request was blocked, rewritten, routed to a particular Worker, or served from cache meant piecing together separate logs and configuration screens. With Traces, that information lives in one request-level timeline. For example, a site owner can open a transform span to see exactly which Transform Rule altered a URL, or expand cache and origin spans to see how much time was spent on a cache miss versus waiting on the origin server.
This builds on Workers Tracing, which Cloudflare launched previously to automatically instrument Worker invocations, including outbound fetches and calls to KV, R2, D1, and Durable Objects. Traces extends that same depth of visibility to anyone using Cloudflare, even those who are not building on Workers but simply have Cloudflare proxying traffic to an origin.
Controlling Data Volume
Because tracing every request could generate significant data, Cloudflare lets administrators set a baseline sampling rate, such as tracing a small percentage of traffic during normal operation. Trace Rules can then override that baseline for specific investigations, for instance tracing 100% of requests from a single customer’s hostname or carrying a specific debug header, without increasing tracing load across the rest of the domain.
Cloudflare Traces can be enabled in the dashboard on any domain, and the company notes it requires no special instrumentation, configuration, or plugins to begin generating spans.