Network metrics

Grafana Beyla can be configured to provide network metrics between different endpoints. For example, between physical nodes, containers, Kubernetes pods, services, etc.

Get started

To get started using Beyla networking metrics, consult the quickstart setup documentation, and for advanced configuration, consult the configuration documentation.

Metric attributes

Beyla provides two families of network metrics:

Network flow bytes as the number of bytes observed between two network endpoints.
- beyla.network.flow.bytes, if it is exported via OpenTelemetry.
- beyla_network_flow_bytes_total, if it is exported by a Prometheus endpoint.
- To enable it, add the network option to the BEYLA_OTEL_METRICS_FEATURES or BEYLA_PROMETHEUS_FEATURES configuration option.
Inter-zone bytes as the number of bytes observed between two network endpoints in different Cloud Availability Zones.
- beyla.network.inter.zone.bytes, if it is exported via OpenTelemetry.
- beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total, if it is exported by a Prometheus endpoint.
- More information about how to enable it in the Measuring traffic between Cloud availability zones documentation.

Network metric can have the attributes in the following table.

By default, only the following attributes are reported for network flow bytes: k8s.src.owner.name, k8s.src.namespace, k8s.dst.owner.name, k8s.dst.namespace, and k8s.cluster.name.

For the inter-zone bytes metric, the default attributes are k8s.cluster.name, src.zone and dst.zone.

Attribute name (OpenTelemetry / Prometheus)	Description
`beyla.ip` / `beyla_ip`	Local IP address of the Beyla instance that emitted the metric
`transport`	L4 Transport protocol (for example, `TCP` or `UDP`)
`src.address` / `src_address`	Source IP address of Network flow
`dst.address` / `dst_address`	Destination IP address of Network flow
`src.port` / `src_port`	Source port of Network flow
`dst.port` / `dst_port`	Destination port of Network flow
`src.name` / `src_name`	Name of Network flow source: Kubernetes name, host name, or IP address
`dst.name` / `dst_name`	Name of Network flow destination: Kubernetes name, host name, or IP address
`src.cidr` / `src_cidr`	If the `cidrs` configuration section is set, the CIDR that matches the source IP address
`dst.cidr` / `dst_cidr`	If the `cidrs` configuration section is set, the CIDR that matches the destination IP address
`k8s.src.namespace` / `k8s_src_namespace`	Kubernetes namespace of the source of the flow
`k8s.dst.namespace` / `k8s_dst_namespace`	Kubernetes namespace of the destination of the flow
`k8s.src.name` / `k8s_src_name`	Name of the source Pod, Service, or Node
`k8s.dst.name` / `k8s_dst_name`	Name of the destination Pod, Service, or Node
`k8s.src.type` / `k8s_src_type`	Type of the source: `Pod`, `Node`, or `Service`
`k8s.dst.type` / `k8s_dst_type`	Type of the destination: `Pod`, `Node`, or `Service`
`k8s.src.owner.name` / `k8s_src_owner_name`	Name of the owner of the source Pod. If there is no owner, the Pod name is used
`k8s.dst.owner.name` / `k8s_dst_owner_name`	Name of the owner of the destination Pod. If there is no owner, the Pod name is used
`k8s.src.owner.type` / `k8s_src_owner_type`	Type of the owner of the source Pod: `Deployment`, `DaemonSet`, `ReplicaSet`, `StatefulSet`, or `Pod` if there is no owner
`k8s.dst.owner.type` / `k8s_dst_owner_type`	Type of the owner of the destination Pod: `Deployment`, `DaemonSet`, `ReplicaSet`, `StatefulSet`, or `Pod` if there is no owner
`k8s.src.node.ip` / `k8s_src_node_ip`	IP address of the source Node
`k8s.dst.node.ip` / `k8s_dst_node_ip`	IP address of the destination Node
`k8s.src.node.name` / `k8s_src.node_name`	Name of the source Node
`k8s.dst.node.name` / `k8s_dst.node_name`	Name of the destination Node
`k8s.cluster.name` / `k8s_cluster_name`	Name of the Kubernetes cluster. Beyla can auto-detect it on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. For other providers, set the `BEYLA_KUBE_CLUSTER_NAME` property
`src.zone` / `src_zone`	Name of the source Cloud Availability Zone
`dsg.zone` / `dst_zone`	Name of the destination Cloud Availability Zone

How to specify reported attributes

If the metric with all the possible attributes is reported it might lead to a cardinality explosion, especially when including external traffic in the src.address/dst.address attributes.

You can specify which attributes are allowed in the Beyla configuration, to aggregate the metric by them.

For example:

yaml
network:
  enable: true
attributes:
  kubernetes:
    enable: true
  select:
    beyla_network_flow_bytes:
      include:
        - k8s.src.owner.name
        - k8s.src.namespace
        - k8s.dst.owner.name
        - k8s.dst.namespace
        - k8s.cluster.name

In this example, the bytes metric is the aggregated by the source and destination owners. This is, all the pods from a given Deployment/StatefulSet/ReplicaSet/DaemonSet.

For more information about the attributes.select section, check the Configuration options.