Introducing Cloudflare Traces: follow requests through our entire platform

Today, we’re introducing Cloudflare Traces in open beta, extending automatic tracing beyond Workers to the rest of the request path. In one trace, you can see supported security rules, transformations, cache decisions, routing, Worker execution, and origin handling, then continue that trace through services running on Cloudflare, at your origin, or elsewhere in your stack. This is a long-term investment in OpenTelemetry and in making Cloudflare the most observable part of your stack.

You can now:

• Automatically trace requests across Cloudflare: Capture supported platform operations in one request-level timeline, no additional set up required.
• Control which requests are traced: Set a baseline sampling rate, then use Trace Rules to override it for matching traffic.
• End-to-end trace context propagation: Accept and forward W3C traceparent headers 
• Investigate traces in Cloudflare: View request timelines and span details directly in the Cloudflare dashboard.
• Export traces with OpenTelemetry: Send your spans to any destination with a compatible Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) endpoint.

You can enable tracing in the Cloudflare dashboard on any domain or let your agent set up for you:

Cloudflare Workers and Containers now support inbound TCP connections and gRPC

AI is changing how people interact with computers, and voice is becoming an increasingly important part of that shift. Real-time assistants, AI-powered dictation, and other voice interfaces need low-latency communication between clients, models, and supporting services. Many developers use gRPC, a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework built on HTTP/2 and TCP, for this infrastructure.

Ever since Workers launched in 2017, we’ve been expanding their capabilities, including adding the ability to open outbound TCP connections and a JavaScript-native RPC system built on Cap’n Proto. And so as part of Agents Week, we’re extending Workers in the other direction, supporting inbound TCP connections and adding new ways to run gRPC applications on Cloudflare.

Today, we’re announcing:

• connect(socket) — a new handler in the Workers runtime that lets your Worker directly accept an inbound TCP socket provided by Spectrum (Cloudflare’s ingress proxy for non-HTTP traffic)
• Full-duplex, bi-directional gRPC from Cloudflare Containers — forward the socket from your Worker to your gRPC server running in a container
• Workers can serve unary and server-streaming gRPC APIs and call gRPC servers — you write your code using gRPC-web, and Cloudflare automatically converts incoming and outgoing requests to gRPC

We’re introducing this in private beta — Continue reading