This is documentation for the next version of Grafana Beyla documentation. For the latest stable release, go to the latest version.

Documentation Beyla Configure Metrics attributes

Configure Beyla metrics and traces attributes

You can configure how Beyla decorates attributes for metrics and traces. Use the attributes top YAML section to enable and configure how attributes are set.

The Beyla exported metrics document lists the attributes you can report with each metric. Beyla reports some attributes by default and hides others to control cardinality.

For each metric, you control which attributes to see with the select subsection. This is a map where each key is the name of a metric either in its OpenTelemetry or Prometheus port, and each metric has two sub-properties: include and exclude.

• include is a list of attributes to report. Each attribute can be a name or a wildcard, for example, k8s.dst.* to include all attributes starting with k8s.dst. If you don’t provide an include list, Beyla reports the default attribute set, refer to Beyla exported metrics for more information about default attributes for a given metric
• exclude is a list of attribute names or wildcards to remove from the include list, or the default attribute set

Example:

YAML Copy

attributes:
  select:
    beyla_network_flow_bytes:
      # limit the beyla_network_flow_bytes attributes to only the three attributes
      include:
        - beyla.ip
        - src.name
        - dst.port
    sql_client_duration:
      # report all the possible attributes but db_statement
      include: ["*"]
      exclude: ["db_statement"]
    http_client_request_duration:
      # report the default attribute set but exclude the Kubernetes Pod information
      exclude: ["k8s.pod.*"]

Additionally, you can use wildcards as metric names to add and exclude attributes for groups of metrics with the same name. For example:

YAML Copy

attributes:
  select:
    http_*:
      include: ["*"]
      exclude: ["http_path", "http_route"]
    http_client_*:
      # override http_* exclusion
      include: ["http_path"]
    http_server_*:
      # override http_* exclusion
      include: ["http_route"]

In the previous example, all metrics with a name starting with http_ or http. include all possible attributes except http_path and http_route or http.path/http.route. The http_client_* and http_server_* sections override the base configuration, enabling the http_path attribute for HTTP client metrics and http_route for HTTP server metrics.

When a metric name matches multiple definitions using wildcards, exact matches take precedence over wildcard matches.

Instance ID decoration

YAML section: attributes.instance_id

Beyla decorates metrics and traces with a unique instance ID string, identifying each instrumented application. By default, Beyla uses the host name that runs Beyla (can be a container or Pod name), followed by the PID of the instrumented process. You can override how the instance ID is composed in the instance_id YAML subsection under the attributes top-level section.

For example:

YAML Copy

attributes:
  instance_id:
    dns: false

DNS

If true, Beyla tries to resolve the local hostname against the network DNS. If false, it uses the local hostname.

Override hostname

If set, Beyla uses the provided string as the host part of the Instance ID instead of trying to resolve the host name. This option takes precedence over dns.

Kubernetes decorator

YAML section: attributes.kubernetes

You can configure the component under the attributes.kubernetes section of your YAML configuration or via environment variables.

To enable this feature, you must provide extra permissions to the Beyla Pod. See the “Configuring Kubernetes metadata decoration section” in the “Running Beyla in Kubernetes” page.

If you set this option to true, Beyla decorates metrics and traces with Kubernetes metadata. If you set it to false, Beyla disables the Kubernetes metadata decorator. If you set it to autodetect, Beyla tries to detect if it is running inside Kubernetes and enables metadata decoration if so.

For example:

YAML Copy

attributes:
  kubernetes:
    enable: true

Enable kubernetes

If you run Beyla in a Kubernetes environment, you can configure it to decorate traces and metrics with the standard OpenTelemetry labels:

• k8s.namespace.name
• k8s.deployment.name
• k8s.statefulset.name
• k8s.replicaset.name
• k8s.daemonset.name
• k8s.node.name
• k8s.pod.name
• k8s.container.name
• k8s.pod.uid
• k8s.pod.start_time
• k8s.cluster.name

Kubernetes configuration path

This is a standard Kubernetes configuration environment variable. Use it to tell Beyla where to find the Kubernetes configuration to communicate with the Kubernetes Cluster. Usually, you do not need to change this value.

Disable informers

The accepted value is a list that might contain node and service.

This option lets you selectively disable some Kubernetes informers, which continuously listen to the Kubernetes API to get the metadata needed for decorating network metrics or application metrics and traces.

When you deploy Beyla as a DaemonSet in very large clusters, all the Beyla instances creating multiple informers might overload the Kubernetes API.

Disabling some informers causes reported metadata to be incomplete, but reduces the load on the Kubernetes API.

You cannot disable the Pods informer. To do that, disable the whole Kubernetes metadata decoration.

Meta restrict local node

If true, Beyla stores Pod and Node metadata only from the node where the Beyla instance runs.

This option decreases the memory used to store metadata, but some metrics such as network bytes or service graph metrics won’t include metadata from destination pods on a different node.

Informers sync timeout

This is the maximum time Beyla waits to get all the Kubernetes metadata before starting to decorate metrics and traces. If this timeout is reached, Beyla starts normally, but the metadata attributes might be incomplete until all the Kubernetes metadata is updated in the background.

Informers resynchronization period

Beyla immediately receives any update on resources’ metadata. In addition, Beyla periodically resynchronizes all Kubernetes metadata at the frequency you specify with this property. Higher values reduce the load on the Kubernetes API service.

Service name template

You can template service names using Go templates. This lets you create conditional or extended service names.

The following context is available to the template:

Copy

Meta: (*informer.ObjectMeta)
  Name: (string)
  Namespace: (string)
  Labels:
    label1: lv1
    label2: lv2
  Annotations:
    Anno1: av1
    Anno2: av2
  Pod: (*PodInfo)
  ...

ContainerName: (string)

You can find the full object and structure in the kubecache informer.pb.go source file.

Service name template examples:

Copy

{{- .Meta.Namespace }}/{{ index .Meta.Labels "app.kubernetes.io/name" }}/{{ index .Meta.Labels "app.kubernetes.io/component" -}}{{ if .ContainerName }}/{{ .ContainerName -}}{{ end -}}

or

Copy

{{- .Meta.Namespace }}/{{ index .Meta.Labels "app.kubernetes.io/name" }}/{{ index .Meta.Labels "app.kubernetes.io/component" -}}

In this example, only the first line is used and trimmed to prevent white space in the service name.

Extra group attributes

Beyla allows you to enhance your metrics with custom attributes using the extra_group_attributes configuration. This gives you the flexibility to include additional metadata in your metrics, beyond the standard set.

To use this feature, specify the group name and the list of attributes you want to include in that group.

Currently, only the k8s_app_meta group is supported. This group contains Kubernetes-specific metadata such as Pod name, namespace, container name, Pod UID, and more.

Example configuration:

YAML Copy

attributes:
  kubernetes:
    enable: true
  extra_group_attributes:
    k8s_app_meta: ["k8s.app.version"]

In this example:

• Adding k8s.app.version to the extra_group_attributes > k8s_app_meta block causes the k8s.app.version label to appear in the metrics.
• You can also define annotations with the prefix resource.opentelemetry.io/ and suffix k8s.app.version in your Kubernetes manifests, these annotations are automatically included in the metrics.

The following table describes the default group attributes.

And the following table describes the metrics and their associated groups.

Configure cardinality limits

YAML section: attributes

Since Beyla instruments at the protocol level, it doesn’t have access to programming language/framework information about host names or URL routes. Therefore, it’s possible to create a metric cardinality explosion, without putting restrictions on how many possible values can be reported for a given metric label. To limit the possibility of cardinality explosion, Beyla has several options that control cardinality.

Metric span name limit

metric_span_names_limit works per service and only relates to span metrics (metrics option application_span). When the span_name cardinality surpasses this limit, the span_name is be reported as AGGREGATED for all future spans. If the value is set to less or equal to zero, the aggregation is disabled.

Unresolved host names

rename_unresolved_hosts, rename_unresolved_hosts_outgoing and rename_unresolved_hosts_incoming only affect service graph metrics (metrics option application_service_graph).