Faster TraceQL queries with anchored regular expressions in Grafana Cloud Traces

TraceQL queries now use regular expressions that are anchored at both ends. This change makes the queries faster and matches the behavior of PromQL, where regular expressions are also fully anchored.

This is a breaking change, where the query: { span.foo =~ "bar" } is now treated as: { span.foo =~ "^bar$" }.

If you use TraceQL with regular expressions in your Grafana dashboards and you want the unanchored behavior, update the queries to use the unanchored version, such as { span.foo =~ ".*bar.*"}.

Documentation