---
title: "Why Beyla matters for application observability | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn when Beyla is a good fit for auto-instrumentation and the value it provides before you configure OTLP export."
---

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

# Why Beyla matters for application observability

Beyla is useful when you want to start collecting traces quickly without changing application code. It uses eBPF to observe supported Linux HTTP/S and gRPC services and emit telemetry with a lighter setup path than language-specific instrumentation.

Use Beyla when you want to:

- Validate observability quickly in a development or test environment
- Instrument services when source code changes are hard to coordinate
- Start exploring traces and RED metrics before investing in deeper instrumentation
- Reduce onboarding friction for teams that need fast time-to-value

With Beyla, you can capture request flow data from a running service and send it to Grafana Cloud with a small amount of configuration. That helps you answer questions such as whether requests reach the service, which requests are slow or error-prone, and whether trace data flows end to end into Grafana Cloud.

Beyla is best for quickstart and early observability use cases. As your needs grow, you might pair it with or move to a collector-based setup such as Grafana Alloy for more control over processing, routing, sampling, and enrichment.

In the next milestone, you configure the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint and credentials that Beyla uses to export telemetry.

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### More to explore (optional)

- [Grafana Beyla overview](/docs/beyla/latest/)
- [Send traces to Grafana Cloud using Alloy](/docs/learning-paths/send-traces-alloy/)
- [Distributed tracing in Grafana Tempo](/docs/tempo/latest/introduction/)