Introduction to eBPF with Grafana Beyla, with Nikola Grcevski (Grafana Office Hours #25)

Nikola Grcevski, Principal Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, gives us an introduction to eBPF with Grafana Beyla. We discuss what is eBPF, how you can use it to auto-instrument applications, and how to get started with Beyla. eBPF observability is all the rage because we all want automagical instrumentation-- but does it live up to that promise? Nikola's here to tell us what eBPF can and can't do, and where he'd like to take Beyla next. Grafana Beyla repo: https://github.com/grafana/beyla Grafana Beyla docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/beyla/ Application Observability docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/application-observability/ // TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Introductions 00:03:17 Why instrumenting for observability can be difficult 00:12:48 How does eBPF auto-instrumentation actually work? 00:16:52 Use cases for eBPF 00:24:29 What is Grafana Beyla? 00:31:26 Demo: Setting up Beyla on Kubernetes 00:44:34 Demo: Application Observability on Grafana Cloud 00:46:06 Distributed tracing with Beyla 00:52:41 Can you use Beyla without Grafana Cloud? 00:53:43 Alternatives for Beyla, and differences 00:58:54 Ultimate goal for Beyla --- Contact Nikola: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-grcevski-16796717/ Contact Nicole: Mastodon: https://pkm.social/@nicole LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nvanderhoeven/ Site: https://nicolevanderhoeven.com Contact Paul: X: https://twitter.com/javaducky LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pabalogh/ Site: https://javaducky.com/ Learn more about Grafana Labs: Website: https://grafana.com Repo: https://github.com/grafana/grafana