--- title: "Deploy Beyla in Kubernetes with Helm for Grafana Cloud | Grafana Beyla documentation" description: "Learn how to deploy Beyla with a Helm chart in Kubernetes for Knowledge Graph and Application Observability in Grafana Cloud." --- # Deploy Beyla in Kubernetes with Helm for Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph and Application Observability This documentation section explains the best practices for deploying Beyla using the Helm chart, but specifically for [Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph](/docs/grafana-cloud/knowledge-graph/) and [Application Observability](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/). Knowledge Graph and Application Observability in Grafana Cloud rely on OpenTelemetry span and service graph metrics, which are typically produced from traces. Beyla can directly generate span and service graph metrics, without having to generate traces, which means that we can configure head sampling for OpenTelemetry traces, or disable trace generation completely, and still generate correct Request-Error-Duration(RED) metrics. If you are familiar with the Grafana Cloud Application Observability configuration for the Tempo span metric generator, this component is not needed, nor needs to be configured/enabled for Beyla span and service graph metrics generation. > Note > > For more details about the diverse Helm configuration options, check out the [Beyla Helm chart options](https://github.com/grafana/beyla/blob/main/charts/beyla/README.md) document. Contents: - [Deploy Beyla with Helm for Grafana Cloud](#deploy-beyla-from-helm) - [Configure Beyla](#configure-beyla) - [Configure Beyla metadata](#configure-beyla-metadata) - [Provide secrets to the Helm configuration](#provide-secrets-to-the-helm-configuration) ## Deploy Beyla with Helm for Grafana Cloud First, you need to add the Grafana helm repository to Helm: sh ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```sh helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts ``` If you have previously added the Grafana Helm repository, run the update command to refresh the helm repository information: sh ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```sh helm repo update ``` The following command deploys a Beyla DaemonSet with a default configuration for Grafana Cloud in the `beyla` namespace: sh ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```sh helm upgrade --install --atomic --timeout 300s beyla grafana/beyla --namespace "beyla" --create-namespace --values - < e.g. "https://otlp-gateway-ops-eu-south-0.grafana-ops.net/otlp/v1/metrics" features: - application_span - application_service_graph - application_host otel_traces_export: endpoint: e.g. "https://otlp-gateway-ops-eu-south-0.grafana-ops.net/otlp/v1/traces" env: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_HEADERS: "Authorization=Basic " OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_HEADERS: "Authorization=Basic " EOF ``` The Beyla configuration above: - exports metrics and traces in a format that can be consumed by Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph and Application Observability. - exports host information metrics `application_host` which are needed for the host based pricing model of the Grafana Cloud products. - tries to instrument all the applications in your cluster. - only provides application-level metrics (span and service graph) and excludes [network-level metrics](../../network/) by default - configures Beyla to decorate the metrics with Kubernetes metadata labels, for example `k8s.namespace.name` or `k8s.pod.name` ## Configure Beyla You might want to override the default configuration of Beyla. For example, to export the metrics using the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions instead of span metrics, or to restrict the number of services to instrument. You can override the default [Beyla configuration options](../../configure/) with your own values. For example, create a `helm-beyla.yml` file with a custom configuration: YAML ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```yaml config: data: # Contents of the actual Beyla configuration file, # specifying only two Kubernetes namespaces to be instrumented. discovery: instrument: - k8s_namespace: demo - k8s_namespace: blog metrics: features: - application_span - application_service_graph - application_host otel_metrics_export: endpoint: e.g. "https://otlp-gateway-ops-eu-south-0.grafana-ops.net/otlp/v1/metrics" otel_traces_export: endpoint: e.g. "https://otlp-gateway-ops-eu-south-0.grafana-ops.net/otlp/v1/traces" routes: unmatched: heuristic env: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_HEADERS: "Authorization=Basic " OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_HEADERS: "Authorization=Basic " ``` The `config.data` section contains a Beyla configuration file, documented in the [Beyla configuration options documentation](../../configure/options/). Then pass the overridden configuration to the `helm` command with the `-f` flag. For example: sh ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```sh helm install beyla grafana/beyla -f helm-beyla.yml ``` or, if the Beyla chart was previously deployed: sh ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```sh helm upgrade beyla grafana/beyla -f helm-beyla.yml ``` ## Configure Beyla metadata If Beyla exports the data using the Prometheus exporter, you can expose its metrics by creating a Kubernetes Service and configuring a ServiceMonitor, allowing your Prometheus scraper to discover it. To enable this feature, edit your `helm-beyla.yml` file to include the following configuration: YAML ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```yaml service: enabled: true serviceMonitor: enabled: true ``` > Note > > Configure your Prometheus scraper with [`honor_labels: true`](../../configure/export-data/#prometheus-exporter-component) to preserve the per-process instance identifiers set by Beyla. Analogously, the Helm chart allows overriding names, labels, and annotations for multiple resources involved in the deployment of Beyla, such as service accounts, cluster roles, security contexts, etc. The [Beyla Helm chart documentation](https://github.com/grafana/beyla/blob/main/charts/beyla/README.md) describes the diverse configuration options. ## Provide secrets to the Helm configuration If you are submitting directly the metrics and traces to Grafana Cloud via the OpenTelemetry Endpoint, you need to provide the credentials via the `OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS` environment variable. The recommended way is to store such value in a Kubernetes Secret and then specify the environment variable referring to it from the Helm configuration. For example, deploy the following secret: YAML ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```yaml apiVersion: v1 kind: Secret metadata: name: grafana-secret type: Opaque stringData: otlp-headers: "Authorization=Basic ...." ``` Then refer to it from the `helm-config.yml` file via the `envValueFrom` section: YAML ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```yaml env: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: "<...your Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint URL...>" envValueFrom: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS: secretKeyRef: key: otlp-headers name: grafana-secret ```