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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Grafana Beyla Has a Free API: Zero-Code Observability With eBPF

#grafana #observability #ebpf #devops

What if you could get full observability — metrics and traces — without changing a single line of code? Without even restarting your app?

That's Grafana Beyla.

What Is Grafana Beyla?

Grafana Beyla uses eBPF to automatically instrument your applications. It hooks into the Linux kernel to capture HTTP requests, gRPC calls, SQL queries, and DNS lookups — without any SDK, agent library, or code changes.

# That's the entire setup
BEYLA_OPEN_PORT=8080 beyla
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Your Go, Python, Node.js, Java, Rust, or C++ service running on port 8080 now has metrics and traces. No code changes. No restart.

What It Captures Automatically

  • HTTP/HTTPS requests (server and client)
  • gRPC calls
  • SQL queries (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
  • Redis commands
  • Kafka produce/consume
  • DNS lookups

For each: latency, status code, request/response size, source/destination.

Metrics Output

Beyla generates Prometheus metrics automatically:

# HTTP server metrics
http_server_request_duration_seconds_bucket{method="GET", status="200", route="/api/users", le="0.005"} 42
http_server_request_duration_seconds_sum{method="GET", status="200", route="/api/users"} 0.156

# HTTP client metrics  
http_client_request_duration_seconds_bucket{method="POST", url="https://api.stripe.com"} 8

# Database metrics
db_client_operation_duration_seconds_bucket{db_system="postgresql", operation="SELECT"} 120
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These are OpenTelemetry-standard metric names. They work with any dashboard.

Distributed Traces

Beyla also generates distributed traces — propagating trace context through HTTP headers automatically:

BEYLA_OPEN_PORT=8080 OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://tempo:4317 beyla
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Your service now appears in Grafana Tempo trace views. With zero instrumentation code.

Why Beyla

  • Zero code — no SDK, no library, no code changes, no restart
  • Language agnostic — works with any language that makes system calls
  • Low overhead — eBPF runs in kernel space, <1% CPU overhead
  • Production safe — eBPF programs are verified by the kernel before execution
  • Perfect for legacy — instrument apps you can't modify

Building observability solutions? Check out my automation tools or email spinov001@gmail.com.

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