---
title: "Measure traffic between Cloud availability zones | Grafana Beyla documentation"
description: "How to measure the network traffic between different Cloud availability zones"
---

# Measure traffic between Cloud availability zones

> Note
> 
> This feature is currently only available in Kubernetes clusters.

Traffic between Cloud Availability Zones might incur additional costs. Beyla is able to measure it either by adding `src.zone` and `dst.zone` attributes to regular network metrics, or by providing a separate `beyla.network.inter.zone.bytes` (OTEL) / `beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total` (Prometheus) metric.

## Add `src.zone` and `dst.zone` attributes to regular network metrics

Source and destination availability zone attributes are disabled by default in Beyla. To enable it, explicitly add them to the list of included network attributes in the Beyla YAML configuration:

![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```none
attributes:
  select:
    beyla_network_flow_bytes:
      include:
        - k8s.src.owner.name
        - k8s.src.namespace
        - k8s.dst.owner.name
        - k8s.dst.namespace
        - k8s.cluster.name
        - src.zone
        - dst.zone
```

This configuration makes inter-zone traffic visible for each `beyla_network_flow_bytes_total` metric with different `src_zone` and `dst_zone` attributes.

If you require higher granularity in your inter-zone traffic measurement (for example, source/destination pods or nodes), adding zone attributes would impact the cardinality of the metric, even for traffic within the same availability zone.

## Use the `beyla.network.inter.zone` metric

Using a separate metric for inter-zone traffic reduces the metric cardinality impact of collecting this data, because the `src.zone` and `dst.zone` attributes are not added to the regular network metrics.

To enable the `beyla.network.inter.zone` metric, add the `network_inter_zone` option to the [BEYLA\_OTEL\_METRICS\_FEATURES or BEYLA\_PROMETHEUS\_FEATURES](../../configure/export-data/) configuration option, or its equivalent YAML options. For example, if Beyla is configured to export metrics via OpenTelemetry:

YAML ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```yaml
otel_metrics_export:
  features:
    - network
    - network_inter_zone
```

By default, the `beyla.network.inter.zone` metric includes only high-level attributes such as zone information and source/destination owner names to keep metric cardinality low. However, you might want to analyze inter-zone traffic at a more granular level, such as by individual pods or nodes, to identify specific sources of cross-zone communication.

To include additional attributes for detailed analysis, configure attribute selection specifically for the inter-zone metric:

YAML ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```yaml
attributes:
  select:
    beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes:
      include:
        - k8s.src.namespace
        - k8s.src.pod.name
        - k8s.src.node.name
        - k8s.dst.namespace
        - k8s.dst.pod.name
        - k8s.dst.node.name
        - k8s.cluster.name
        - src.zone
        - dst.zone
```

This configuration provides detailed visibility into which specific pods and nodes generate inter-zone traffic, helping you optimize your application topology and reduce cross-zone costs.

> Note
> 
> Adding more attributes increases the metric cardinality.

## PromQL queries to measure inter-zone traffic

Assuming that both `network` and `network_inter_zone` metric families are enabled, you can use the following PromQL queries to measure inter-zone traffic:

Overall inter-zone traffic throughput:

![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```none
sum(rate(beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
```

Inter-zone traffic throughput, summarized by source and destination zones:

![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```none
sum(rate(beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval])) by(src_zone,dst_zone)
```

Overall same-zone traffic throughput:

![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```none
sum(rate(beyla_network_flow_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
  - sum(rate(beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
```

Percentage of inter-zone traffic from the total:

![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```none
100 * sum(rate(beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
  / sum(rate(beyla_network_flow_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
```