Grafana Beyla: what’s new and what’s next for the open source eBPF auto-instrumentation tool

Grafana Beyla, an open-source eBPF auto-instrumentation tool by Grafana Labs, has significantly advanced since its launch, fostering a robust community of external contributors who have shaped its development. Beyla excels in providing easy access to application and service graph metrics, supporting a range of protocols beyond its initial HTTP and gRPC, and is widely used for OpenTelemetry observability. Despite challenges with distributed traces due to eBPF's complexities, the team has made strides toward enabling full support in the upcoming 2.0 release. Production deployment required optimizing resource utilization and managing eBPF permissions to address security concerns. Future plans include leveraging the OpenTelemetry eBPF Profiler for deeper insights and enhancing language support for top programming languages like Java, .NET, and Python, without compromising Beyla's language-agnostic capabilities. The project’s evolution reflects the collaborative efforts within its community and the ongoing pursuit of improved observability solutions.