Introduction to eBPF with Grafana Beyla, with Nikola Grcevski (Grafana Office Hours #25)

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: github.com/grafana/beyla
Grafana Beyla docs: grafana.com/docs/grafana-clou...
Application Observability docs: grafana.com/docs/grafana-clou...
// 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: / nikola-grcevski-16796717
Contact Nicole:
Mastodon: pkm.social/@nicole
LinkedIn: / nvanderhoeven
Site: nicolevanderhoeven.com
Contact Paul:
X: / javaducky
LinkedIn: / pabalogh
Site: javaducky.com/
Learn more about Grafana Labs:
Website: grafana.com
Repo: github.com/grafana/grafana

[@venkatareddy56]

How to push metrics to alloy?

[@adnanrahic198]

This is really cool! Excited to try Beyla out. 😁

[@Grafana]

Hi Adnan! Nice to see you here. :) Let us know how you go if you do! - Nicole