Vercel Tracing Is GA, On by Default for Next.js 16.5

Vercel Tracing is now generally available on all plans, and new Next.js 16.5 projects get it switched on by default at 100% sampling.

That default is the part to act on. Per the changelog, in beta "nothing was collected until you added a sampling rule." Now, "new projects created on Vercel that include at least one Node.js function get tracing turned on after their first successful build," with Vercel adding "one sampling rule tracing 100% of requests in all environments" and injecting instrumentation at build time. Pricing is unchanged from the beta.

What you get without setup

Because instrumentation is injected at build time, traces "include Next.js framework spans with no setup." If you would rather not collect everything, the opt-out is explicit: remove all sampling rules in Settings → Tracing.

Retention also moved, and this is the change most likely to alter how you debug. In beta, traces followed runtime log retention. Now Hobby keeps traces for 3 days instead of 1 hour, Pro for 14 days instead of 1 day, and Enterprise for 14 days instead of 3 days.

A one-hour window meant tracing only helped if you were already watching. Three days on the free tier means a Monday incident is still inspectable on Tuesday.

The Traces page and KQL

In beta, you could "only open a trace per request from the Logs page." The new Traces page shows "every trace and span in one place, for a project or your whole team," with separate Spans and Traces lists, filters on each, and search in Kibana Query Language. A Live mode streams new traces as they arrive.

The changelog's example query narrows to slow database spans by name and duration:

span.name:db* AND span.duration > 500

Same queries in the CLI

The detail worth planning around: "The Traces page uses the same KQL as vercel traces search --query, so a query built in the dashboard runs in the CLI unchanged." A query you work out by clicking is a query you can paste into a script.

Search covers every project in your team, or one project with --project. Single traces open with vercel traces inspect, and sampling rules are managed with vercel traces config. The changelog's two CLI examples find spans slower than two seconds, then every error from the last hour:

vercel traces search --query 'span.duration > 2000'
vercel traces search --status error --since 1h

What to do this week

• If you ship a new Next.js 16.5 project on Vercel, assume tracing is on at 100% in every environment, preview included, after the first successful build. Decide whether you want that before it happens, not after.
• If you want it off, remove every sampling rule in Settings → Tracing. Leaving one in place keeps collection running.
• If you already run tracing on the Pro plan, your debugging window moved from 1 day to 14. Incident reviews that previously had no trace data are now worth reopening.
• Build your queries in the dashboard, then move the exact string into vercel traces search --query so the same filter works in CI.

One thing the changelog does not quantify: what 100% sampling in all environments costs in practice on a busy project. Pricing is stated as unchanged from the beta, but the volume collected by default is not — the default went from nothing to everything. Watch your first full billing period on a new project before assuming the defaults are the right ones for you.