Observability for containerized workloads: How to run Grafana Beyla as a sidecar in Amazon ECS

Grafana Beyla, an open-source eBPF-based auto-instrumentation tool, enables application observability without modifying code, and when integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), it provides deep visibility into containerized workloads, especially when running on Amazon EC2. This integration, which is not supported on AWS Fargate due to the lack of eBPF support, involves configuring Beyla as a sidecar in an ECS task and utilizing Grafana Alloy, an OpenTelemetry collector, to send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud. By setting up an OpenTelemetry listener, telemetry data can be sent through port 4317 for GRPC or port 4318 for HTTP, with necessary configurations stored in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and appropriate IAM permissions granted. This setup allows Beyla to read process IDs from other containers and communicate with Alloy through a shared namespace, ultimately enhancing service reliability and developer productivity by simplifying application observability in modern cloud environments. The integration supports business agility and provides a scalable observability solution that can be monitored and optimized using Grafana Cloud's distributed tracing system, Grafana Tempo, offering a comprehensive platform for metrics, logs, and traces.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.