Nikola Grcevski, Principal Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, gives us an introduction to eBPF with Grafana Beyla. We discuss what is eBPF, how you can use it to auto-instrument applications, and how to get started with Beyla. eBPF observability is all the rage because we all want automagical instrumentation-- but does it live up to that promise? Nikola's here to tell us what eBPF can and can't do, and where he'd like to take Beyla next.

Grafana Beyla repo: https://github.com/grafana/beyla
Grafana Beyla docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/beyla/
Application Observability docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/

// TIMESTAMPS
00:00:00 Introductions
00:03:17 Why instrumenting for observability can be difficult
00:12:48 How does eBPF auto-instrumentation actually work?
00:16:52 Use cases for eBPF
00:24:29 What is Grafana Beyla?
00:31:26 Demo: Setting up Beyla on Kubernetes
00:44:34 Demo: Application Observability on Grafana Cloud
00:46:06 Distributed tracing with Beyla
00:52:41 Can you use Beyla without Grafana Cloud?
00:53:43 Alternatives for Beyla, and differences
00:58:54 Ultimate goal for Beyla

Contact Nikola:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-grcevski-16796717/

Contact Nicole:
Mastodon: https://pkm.social/@nicole
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nvanderhoeven/
Site: https://nicolevanderhoeven.com

Contact Paul:
X: https://twitter.com/javaducky
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pabalogh/
Site: https://javaducky.com/

Learn more about Grafana Labs:
Website: https://grafana.com
Repo: https://github.com/grafana/grafana