If you still export Cloud Trace to BigQuery through a sink, that pipeline is already dead. Per the Trace release notes , trace sinks were deprecated on February 18, 2026 , and since August 31, 2026 you can no longer create or edit one. The replacement is Observability Analytics: a linked dataset that exposes the trace storage to BigQuery with no copy of the data.

The same mechanism exists for Cloud Logging, and that is where it gets confusing. Both features are called "linked dataset", both produce a BigQuery dataset holding a view, and both are configured with Terraform. Almost everything else about them differs. I wired up both in one project, and this is what actually had to be true.

Two bucket systems that look like one

The single biggest time sink: _Trace is not a Cloud Logging log bucket.

$ gcloud logging buckets list --project=my-project LOCATION BUCKET_ID RETENTION_DAYS LIFECYCLE_STATE global _Default 30 ACTIVE global _Required 400 ACTIVE

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No _Trace .…