Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Beyla

Grafana Cloud

Grafana Beyla

eBPF application auto-instrumentation

Instrumenting an application to obtain metrics and traces typically requires adding a language agent to the application deployment/packages. In some compiled languages like Go or Rust, tracepoints have to be manually added to the code. In both cases, the instrumented version of the application must be redeployed to the staging/production servers.

Grafana Beyla is an eBPF-based application auto-instrumentation tool to easily get started with Application Observability. eBPF is used to automatically inspect application executables and the OS networking layer and capture basic trace spans related to web transactions and Rate-Errors-Duration (RED) metrics for Linux HTTP/S and gRPC services. All data capture occurs without any modifications to application code or configuration.

Beyla offers the following features:

auto-instrument applications written in various programming languages, for example: Go, C/C++, Rust, Python, Ruby, Java (including GraalVM Native), NodeJS, .NET, and others
efficient instrumentation and the low-overhead data capture with natively compiled code even for interpreted languages
vendor agnostic data exports in the OpenTelemetry format and as native Prometheus metrics
runs in any Linux environment
listen to the Kubernetes API to decorate metrics and traces with Pods and Services metadata
simple setup for Grafana customers already using Grafana Agent

Requirements

Linux with Kernel 5.8 or higher with BTF enabled. BTF became enabled by default on most Linux distributions with kernel 5.14 or higher. You can check if your kernel has BTF enabled by verifying if /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux exists on your system. If you need to recompile your kernel to enable BTF, the configuration option CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF=y must be set.
eBPF enabled in the host.
For instrumenting Go programs, they must have been compiled with at least Go 1.17. We currently support Go applications built with a major Go version no earlier than 3 versions behind the current stable major release.
Administrative access rights to execute Beyla.