---
title: "Deploy Beyla in Kubernetes with Helm | Grafana Beyla documentation"
description: "Learn how to deploy Beyla as a Helm chart in Kubernetes."
---

# Deploy Beyla in Kubernetes with Helm

> 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](#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

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
```

The following command deploys a Beyla DaemonSet with a default configuration in the `beyla` namespace:

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

```sh
helm install beyla -n beyla --create-namespace  grafana/beyla
```

The default Beyla configuration:

- exports the metrics as Prometheus metrics in the Pod HTTP port `9090`, `/metrics` path.
- tries to instrument all the applications in your cluster.
- only provides application-level metrics 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 and/or spans as OpenTelemetry instead of Prometheus, 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
    discovery:
      instrument:
        - k8s_namespace: demo
        - k8s_namespace: blog
    routes:
      unmatched: heuristic
```

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
```