Auto-Instrument Everything with eBPF: Grafana Beyla + OpenTelemetry in Action | Homelabs

Grafana Beyla is a powerful eBPF-based auto-instrumentation tool for application and network observability. In this session, see how Beyla captures RED metrics and traces with zero code changes, and how it fits into the OpenTelemetry ecosystem. Perfect session for SREs, devs, and home labbers alike.

Chapters:

00:00 – Intro to Beyla

01:34 – Why Beyla Matters

02:40 – Network + Trace Metrics

03:48 – How eBPF Works

05:39 – Framework-Agnostic Insight

07:34 – Protocol-Level Magic

09:35 – Tracing Without Code

10:28 – Donating to OpenTelemetry

12:05 – Real-World Home Lab Use

13:55 – Self-Hosting Services

15:23 – Observability Goals

16:19 – Why Beyla Won

18:15 – Otel vs. Beyla

20:09 – Live Dashboard Demo

21:33 – Book Tracker Project

22:55 – Manual Instrumentation Pain

24:30 – SQL Tracing Example

25:25 – Beyla vs Native: The Tradeoffs

Links:
Read the Beyla documentation: https://grafana.com/docs/beyla/latest/

Instrument an application with Beyla: https://grafana.com/docs/opentelemetry/instrument/beyla/

Learn about Beyla RED metrics dashboard: https://grafana.com/docs/beyla/latest/beyla-dashboard/

☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. Sign up: https://grafana.com/get/

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