What is Cloudflare Traces?

Software that runs across many connected components is hard to debug: when a request is slow or fails, it is not obvious which step was responsible. Observability is the practice of collecting data about how programs run, using techniques such as logging and tracing, so engineers can understand and debug them. Cloudflare Traces is a Cloudflare feature that follows a web request through Cloudflare and records each supported step, such as security rules, routing, caching, Workers and the connection to the origin server, as a timed span. Its documentation presents it as a way to see, for example, why a request was blocked or challenged, and traces can also be sent to other tools through OpenTelemetry (an open standard for sharing such data) destinations. Cloudflare introduced it in a blog post dated October 2, 2026.

Written from primary sources and reference pages, and checked against them by an independent AI fact-checker. Drafted with AI assistance.