2 October, Cloudflare's Birthday Week. Traces is in open beta: you follow one request through security rules, cache, the Worker and on to origin, with OTLP export and billing from 1 December. OHTTP Gateway is in closed beta: your application gets the contents of the request, and who sent it stays with another operator.
- Traces follows a request through security, cache, routing, Workers and origin, accepts and forwards W3C traceparent, exports over OTLP, and has an MCP server for coding agents.
- Billing from 1 December: free 0.5 GB per day with 7 days retention; Paid and Enterprise with 50 GB and 10 GB-month included, $0.25 per GB above that.
- OHTTP Gateway: the relay sees who is asking, the gateway sees what they ask, nobody sees both. Cloudflare's gateway refuses requests that passed through Cloudflare itself.
A request enters Cloudflare and comes out at your server, and between the two there are ten steps you have so far watched through a keyhole. Did a rule stop it? Did the cache answer? Did the Worker add two hundred milliseconds? Now there is one identifier that runs through all of them.
Tracing is not new. What is new is who provides it. Until now Cloudflare was the black box in the middle of every trace: you see up to the entrance, you see after the exit, and in between you write "CDN" and guess. If your site sits behind them, half of the "why is it slow" mysteries live in exactly that stretch.
For OHTTP, read the last line. Cloudflare forbids itself from being both sides. That is the whole point of the protocol: if one company holds both the relay and the gateway, the separation is theatre. They describe it as the gateway's behaviour: a refusal, not a promise.
Traces is free until 1 December and free after that too, up to half a gigabyte a day. Turn it on now for one domain and see how many GB you produce. By December you will know whether half a gigabyte a day is enough for you or Traces becomes a line on the invoice.