Trace release notes

The following limits associated with the Cloud Trace API, cloudtrace.googleapis.com, have increased:

• Maximum attributes per span: 1,024
• Maximum attribute value size: 65,532 bytes
• Maximum attribute key size: 512 bytes
• Maximum span name length: 1,024 bytes
• Maximum events per span: 256

The new limits are consistent with those supported by the Telemetry API, which implements the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).

For more information, see Cloud Trace API quotas and limits.

The following remote MCP servers automatically generate a trace span for tools/call operations. These spans can help you understand the behavior of your agentic applications. For more information, see Investigate MCP calls using Trace.

• Cloud Billing
• Personalized Service Health

Google Cloud Observability automatically generates trace exemplars for charts on custom dashboards that display the result of a SQL query when the query runs against your trace data and satisfies some constraints. The exemplars link the SQL query result to specific traces. This feature is in Preview.

For more information, see Generate and display trace exemplars.

Google Cloud Observability has expanded the supported locations for observability buckets, which store your trace data, to include the following:

• europe-west9

For a list of supported locations, see Locations for observability buckets.

You can collect, view, and analyze multimodal prompts and responses from your agentic applications that use the LangGraph or Agent Development Kit (ADK) frameworks. This feature is generally available (GA).

• Instrument generative AI applications
• Collect and view multimodal prompts and responses

The Trace API supports regional endpoints. For a list of supported endpoints, see the REST API reference pages:

• v1 REST reference
• v2 REST reference

Custom dashboards can display trace data. You can view individual spans or aggregated data. This feature is public preview. For more information, see Display traces on a custom dashboard.

To view the instrumentation scope or the schema associated with a span, open the Details view for the span and select the Metadata & Links tab. For more information, see View attributes, log entries, and events.

The create-observability bucket flow enforces organization policies with constraints on resource locations. This flow also enforces policies that require customer-managed encryption keys (CMEKs) and that restrict the projects that store those keys. Your trace data is stored in an observability bucket.

For more information, see the following:

• Set defaults for observability buckets
• Support for CMEKs

The details page for a span can display the call hierarchy of a trace using a directed acyclic graph (DAG). One way to view a span's details is to open the Trace Explorer page and select the span. The DAG view is also available for some integrations. For example, if you view an Application Monitoring dashboard and explore the trace data it displays, the flyout supports the DAG option.

For more information, see the following:

• Trace Explorer: Explore a trace
• Application Monitoring: Explore a trace

You can view the available regional endpoints for the Observability API and for the Telemetry API on their REST reference pages. For more information, see API overview.

Cloud Trace in Observability Analytics is generally available (GA). Observability Analytics lets you query and analyze your trace data by using SQL. You can chart your query results, save your queries, and join your trace and log data.

For more information, see the following documents:

• Query and analyze telemetry with Observability Analytics.
• Chart SQL query results
• Sample SQL queries
• Analyze trace data with BigQuery.

The Observability API is generally available (GA). This API lets you configure the following:

• The default storage location and the default encryption key for your trace data.
• The observability scope.
• A linked BigQuery dataset, which lets your use BigQuery services to analyze your trace data.

For more information, see the following documents:

• Set defaults for observability buckets
• Configure observability scopes for multi-project queries
• Manage observability buckets
• API overview