Cloud Trace API

Name: Cloud Trace API API
Brand: Cloud Trace API
Availability: InStock

✓ Official Vendor SpecDeveloper ToolsMonitoring Observabilityoauth22 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Submit distributed trace spans into Google Cloud Trace from any instrumented service. Lets agents push end-to-end latency data into Google's tracing backend for analysis alongside logs and metrics.

Quickstart

Get started with Cloud Trace API in minutes using your preferred integration method.

# Add to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf)
{
  "jentic": {
    "url": "https://api.jentic.com/mcp",
    "auth": "oauth"
  }
}

# Then ask your agent:
"send trace spans to google cloud"

# → Jentic returns the GET /events tool with parameter schema, agent executes.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with Cloud Trace API API.

Batch-write trace spans for a completed request via traces:batchWrite

Create individual spans with parent IDs, timestamps, and attributes

Push OpenTelemetry spans through the official Cloud Trace exporter

Send traces from non-App-Engine workloads such as Cloud Run and GKE

GET STARTED

Start building with Cloud Trace API API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Use Cases

Patterns agents use Cloud Trace API API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Distributed Tracing For Microservices

Instrument a multi-service application with OpenTelemetry and ship spans to Cloud Trace via the batchWrite endpoint. Each request shows up as an end-to-end trace with latency at every hop, letting platform teams find regressions across service boundaries that would be invisible in single-service profilers.

Batch-write 50 spans representing a single user request through three services to projects/acme via /v2/{name}/traces:batchWrite

Latency Regression Detection

Continuously push trace data into Cloud Trace so the analysis tools can detect latency regressions for a specific RPC after a deploy. Because every span carries start and end timestamps and labels, regression queries can scope to the exact endpoint that changed and surface offending releases without manual log spelunking.

Push spans tagged with build_id=2026-06-10 so Cloud Trace's analysis can compare its p95 latency against the previous build

Spans From Cloud Run And GKE Workloads

Send traces from Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, and GKE workloads that do not benefit from App Engine's automatic tracing. The v2 API takes batched spans with parent IDs, so workloads outside the App Engine runtime can participate in the same traces as the App Engine front end and downstream services.

From a Cloud Run service, batch-write three spans for /api/checkout, the downstream payment call, and the database write under one trace ID

Agent-Submitted Trace Data

An AI agent that orchestrates downstream API calls can submit a trace to Cloud Trace describing each step of its workflow. Through Jentic the agent searches for 'send trace span', loads the spans.batchWrite schema, and pushes its own spans so engineers can see what the agent actually did and where it spent time.

Use Jentic to call traces.batchWrite under projects/acme with five spans representing the agent's plan, search, load, execute, and finalize steps

Key Endpoints

2 endpoints — cloud trace is google cloud's distributed tracing backend.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

POST

/v2/{+name}/traces:batchWrite

Batch-write multiple spans across one or more traces

POST

/v2/{+name}

Create a single span under a parent trace

POST

/v2/{+name}/traces:batchWrite

Batch-write multiple spans across one or more traces

POST

/v2/{+name}

Create a single span under a parent trace

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

Google OAuth 2.0 refresh tokens for Cloud Trace are stored encrypted in the Jentic vault. Agents receive only short-lived access tokens with the trace.append scope at execution time.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search Jentic with intents like 'send trace span' and Jentic returns the traces.batchWrite operation with its request schema, so the agent does not need to read the Cloud Trace discovery doc.

Time to first call

Direct integration with Cloud Trace: 1-2 days for OAuth setup and OpenTelemetry exporter wiring. Through Jentic: under 30 minutes — search, load schema, execute.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Complementary

Cloud Logging API

Stores logs that often need to be correlated with trace spans for root-cause analysis

Send logs and traces from the same workload so Google's observability UI can link them by trace ID

Complementary

Cloud Monitoring API

Stores metrics that complement trace data when investigating regressions

Pair Monitoring metrics with Cloud Trace spans to see whether latency regressions match a CPU or memory spike

Complementary

Compute Engine API

Hosts the VM workloads whose application code emits Cloud Trace spans

Use Compute Engine to provision instances that run the instrumented services exporting to Cloud Trace

FAQs

Specific to using Cloud Trace API API through Jentic.

What authentication does the Cloud Trace API use?

It uses Google OAuth 2.0 with the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/trace.append scope for ingestion and https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform for the broader read paths. Through Jentic the OAuth credentials are stored encrypted in the Jentic vault and never reach the agent runtime.

Can I push OpenTelemetry spans to Cloud Trace?

Yes. Use the official OpenTelemetry exporter for Cloud Trace, or send spans directly to /v2/{name}/traces:batchWrite. The endpoint accepts a list of spans with their parent IDs, start time, end time, and attributes.

What are the rate limits for the Cloud Trace API?

Span ingestion is limited per project per minute and individual spans are capped in size. Batch your spans into the batchWrite endpoint instead of calling spans.create individually to stay well under the per-minute quota.

How do I send a trace span through Jentic?

Search Jentic for 'send trace span', load the traces.batchWrite schema, and execute the call against /v2/{name}/traces:batchWrite with a list of spans. Jentic returns the schema so the agent does not need to read the Cloud Trace discovery doc.

Is the Cloud Trace API free?

Cloud Trace gives a generous monthly free tier of trace spans per billing account and charges a small fee per million spans beyond that. The API itself has no per-call surcharge.