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MLflow 3.16.0 Highlights: Build-Your-Own Trace Views, a Redesigned Trace Explorer, and Span Links

· 3 min read
MLflow maintainers
MLflow maintainers
MLflow maintainers

MLflow 3.16.0 puts you in control of how you observe your GenAI apps. The headline: build your own trace UI just by describing it — the MLflow Assistant turns a plain-English prompt into a custom, reusable trace view. On top of that, this release ships a fully redesigned trace explorer as the default experience and first-class span links for connecting related spans across traces. Here's what's new.

1. Custom Trace Views​

Every team inspects traces differently — so why settle for one fixed layout? In 3.16.0, you can design your own trace UI in plain English. Describe the view you want, and the MLflow Assistant builds it for you: the fields you care about, laid out the way you think about them. It's the power of an LLM and MLflow working together — no config files, no custom code, just a prompt.

Found a layout that clicks? Save it, name it, and reuse it. Views persist per experiment, so your whole team can share the same lens on your traces. Create as many as you need, rename them as your workflow evolves, and delete the ones you've outgrown. Whatever mental model you have for your agent, you can now make the UI match it.

2. A Redesigned Trace Experience​

The trace explorer has been rebuilt from the ground up and is now the default traces experience. The new Traces table brings tighter row density, a cleaner header, and smoother navigation, alongside a redesigned span-tree explorer. Reorder columns to put what matters first, and add configurable custom columns backed by any trace tag or metadata field — so the details you care about are always one glance away.

Sessions are now folded directly into the traces view via session grouping, so multi-turn conversations live right alongside the rest of your traces.

Spans rarely stand alone — a retrieval step, a tool call, or a downstream trace is often related to the span you're looking at. MLflow 3.16.0 adds first-class span links so those relationships are captured and navigable. Record links between spans in your SDK, and the trace explorer surfaces them in a dedicated Links tab — click through to jump straight to the destination span.

Full Changelog​

For a comprehensive list of changes, see the release change log.

What's Next​

Get Started​

Upgrade to try these new features:

pip install mlflow==3.16.0

Share Your Feedback​

We'd love to hear about your experience with these new features:

Learn More​

For a comprehensive list of changes, see the release change log, and check out the latest documentation on mlflow.org.