Open in Grafana Cloud
Complete this learning path directly in your Grafana Cloud stack, or in the Grafana Play stack, with an interactive learning experience.
Instrument your applications with Beyla
Welcome to the learning path that shows you how to use Beyla to automatically instrument applications with OpenTelemetry and send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud.
Beyla is an eBPF-based application auto-instrumentation tool that makes it easy to get started with application observability. Beyla automatically inspects application executables and the OS networking layer to capture trace spans and RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) for Linux HTTP/S and gRPC services—all without modifying your application code or configuration.
How Beyla fits into your observability stack: Application → Beyla → OTLP → Grafana Cloud
Here’s what to expect
When you complete this path, you’ll be able to:
- Understand how eBPF-based auto-instrumentation works and when to use it
- Configure Beyla to send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud’s OTLP endpoint
- Instrument a running application without code changes
- Explore distributed traces in Grafana Cloud
Before you begin
Before you instrument your applications with Beyla, ensure that you have:
- A Grafana Cloud account. To create an account, refer to Grafana Cloud.
- A Linux system with Docker installed. Beyla requires a Linux kernel with BTF support.
- 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.