---
title: "Instrument your applications with Beyla | Grafana Labs"
description: "Welcome to the Grafana learning path that shows you how to use Beyla to automatically instrument your applications with OpenTelemetry and send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud Traces."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Instrument your applications with Beyla

Welcome to the learning path that shows you how to use Grafana Beyla to automatically instrument applications with OpenTelemetry and send metrics and traces to Grafana Cloud.

Beyla is an eBPF-based application auto-instrumentation tool that helps you get started with application observability. Beyla inspects application executables and the OS networking layer to capture RED metrics and trace spans for Linux HTTP/S and gRPC services without modifying your application code or configuration.

## Here’s what to expect

When you complete this journey, you’ll be able to:

1. Understand how eBPF-based auto-instrumentation works and when to use it
2. Configure Beyla to send telemetry data to a Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint
3. Instrument a running application without code changes
4. Explore distributed traces in Grafana Cloud

## Before you begin

Before you instrument your applications with Beyla, ensure you have:

- A [Grafana Cloud account](/signup/cloud/connect-account).
- A Linux system with Docker installed.
- Administrative privileges on your system to run Docker containers.

## Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, we’ve got your back! Where appropriate, troubleshooting information is just a click away.

## More to explore

We understand you might want to explore other capabilities not strictly on this path. We’ll provide you opportunities where it makes sense.