Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Network

Grafana Cloud

Warning
Network metrics is an experimental under development feature, expect breaking changes.

Network metrics

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

Note
Prometheus exporting for network metrics is not currently supported.

Get started

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

Metric attributes

Network metrics provides a single OpenTelemetry metric beyla.network.flow.bytes, a counter of Number of bytes observed between two network endpoints, and can have the attributes in the following table.

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

Attribute name	Description
`beyla.ip`	Local IP address of the Beyla instance that emitted the metric
`src.address`	Source IP address of Network flow
`dst.address`	Destination IP address of Network flow
`src.name`	Name of Network flow source: Kubernetes name, host name, or IP address
`dst.name`	Name of Network flow destination: Kubernetes name, host name, or IP address
`src.cidr`	If the `cidrs` configuration section is set, the CIDR that matches the source IP address
`dst.cidr`	If the `cidrs` configuration section is set, the CIDR that matches the destination IP address
`k8s.src.namespace`	Kubernetes namespace of the source of the flow
`k8s.dst.namespace`	Kubernetes namespace of the destination of the flow
`k8s.src.name`	Name of the source Pod, Service, or Node
`k8s.dst.name`	Name of the destination Pod, Service, or Node
`k8s.src.type`	Type of the source: `Pod`, `Node`, or `Service`
`k8s.src.type`	Type of the destination: `Pod`, `Node`, or `Service`
`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`	Name of the owner of the destination Pod. If there is no owner, the Pod name is used
`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`	Type of the owner of the destination Pod: `Deployment`, `DaemonSet`, `ReplicaSet`, `StatefulSet`, or `Pod` if there is no owner
`k8s.src.node.ip`	IP address of the source Node
`k8s.dst.node.ip`	IP address of the destination Node
`k8s.src.node.name`	Name of the source Node
`k8s.dst.node.name`	Name of the destination Node
`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

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:

network:
  enable: true
  allowed_attributes:
    - 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.