Always-on tracing for production and preview traffic
By Steven Van ·
With always-on tracing, you can now debug your real user requests without reproducing them.
Vercel's always-on tracing continuously samples requests from production and preview traffic, so a real user request can be debugged without reproducing it. That's different from session tracing, which only captures requests made from your own browser.
Nothing is collected until a sampling rule is added. Each rule sets a trace rate for an environment (All, Production, or Preview), optionally scoped to a path prefix such as /checkout, and rules can also be managed from the CLI with vercel traces config set, which updates the rate if run again for the same environment and path.
- Infrastructure and outbound fetch spans are captured automatically.
- Framework and custom spans require instrumenting the app with @vercel/otel.
- Traces can be viewed in the Logs dashboard or with vercel traces get.
Always-on tracing is in beta and available to teams on all plans, priced at $0.50 per 1M span units. Traces follow runtime log retention: 1 hour on Hobby, 1 day on Pro, and 3 days on Enterprise.
