Which projects start collecting traces
Vercel announced general availability for its tracing tools on November 6. Teams can use traces to investigate what happened inside a slow or failed web request after it has finished. A developer can narrow the search in Vercel’s dashboard or command-line tool, then open the relevant request to inspect where it spent time.
According to Vercel’s documentation, automatic collection applies to projects created on or after November 5 that build on Vercel with Next.js 16.5 or later and include a Node.js function. It starts after the first successful qualifying build. Projects deployed as prebuilt artifacts, static exports and Edge-only apps fall outside that default.
What teams can control
The initial rule on eligible projects covers every request in both production and preview. Teams can reduce the percentage, narrow collection by environment or path, or remove the rules to stop tracing. That makes the rule worth checking when a preview gets sustained traffic, even if the production workload is small.
Vercel lists three days of trace retention on Hobby and 14 days on Pro and Enterprise. Its pricing documentation lists a monthly allowance on Hobby, usage-based charges on Pro and custom Enterprise pricing. Vercel counts usage based on the size and number of indexed spans, so a single request can consume multiple units. The company gave no country-by-country rollout details. CGH reviewed the published configuration and pricing and did not test a deployment.