This is documentation for the next version of Grafana Beyla documentation. For the latest stable release, go to the latest version.

Set up

Beyla Helm chart for Grafana Cloud

Open source

Deploy Beyla with the Beyla Helm chart for Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud Application Observability and Knowledge Graph use span metrics and service graph metrics. Other instrumentation usually derives these metrics from traces. Beyla generates them directly, so you can sample traces or turn traces off and still get complete request rate, error, and duration (RED) metrics.

With the Beyla Helm chart, Beyla sends these metrics and traces directly to the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint, with no collector in between.

Before you begin

Before you deploy Beyla, make sure you have the following:

A Kubernetes cluster whose nodes meet the Beyla requirements and limitations
Helm and kubectl, configured for the cluster
Permission to create cluster-scoped resources and privileged Pods
A Grafana Cloud stack, and the OTLP endpoint and credentials for it. To find them, follow the procedure in Send data to the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint.

With the default chart values, Beyla runs as a privileged DaemonSet in the host process ID (PID) and network namespaces of each node.

Deploy Beyla for Grafana Cloud

To deploy Beyla for Grafana Cloud, complete the following steps:

If the beyla namespace doesn’t exist, create it with kubectl create namespace beyla.
Save the following Secret as grafana-secret.yml, and create it with kubectl apply -f grafana-secret.yml:
YAML
```
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: grafana-secret
  namespace: beyla
type: Opaque
stringData:
  otlp-headers: "Authorization=Basic <BASE64_CREDENTIALS>"
```
Replace <BASE64_CREDENTIALS> with your instance ID and token, joined by a colon and Base64-encoded. For example, run echo -n '<INSTANCE_ID>:<TOKEN>' | base64 | tr -d '\n'.

Create a helm-beyla.yml file:

config:
  data:
    metrics:
      features:
        - application_span
        - application_service_graph
        - application_host
    prometheus_export: null
env:
  OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: "<OTLP_ENDPOINT>"
envValueFrom:
  OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS:
    secretKeyRef:
      key: otlp-headers
      name: grafana-secret

Replace <OTLP_ENDPOINT> with the OTLP endpoint that you copied from your stack, for example https://otlp-gateway-prod-eu-west-0.grafana.net/otlp. Beyla appends /v1/metrics and /v1/traces.

Add the Grafana Helm repository and update your local chart index:

helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

Install the chart:

helm upgrade --install beyla grafana/beyla --namespace beyla -f helm-beyla.yml

Check that the Beyla Pods are running:
sh
```
kubectl get pods --namespace beyla
```
If a Pod isn’t running, check its logs with kubectl logs --namespace beyla <POD_NAME>, where <POD_NAME> is the Pod name from the previous command.

After your applications receive requests, their services appear in Application Observability in your Grafana Cloud stack.

With this configuration, Beyla does the following:

Instruments applications in every namespace, except Kubernetes system namespaces and other namespaces that Beyla excludes by default
Exports span metrics, service graph metrics, and traces to Grafana Cloud
Exports the application_host metric, which Grafana Cloud uses for host-based pricing
Adds Kubernetes metadata attributes, for example k8s.namespace.name and k8s.pod.name
Doesn’t export network-level metrics or Prometheus metrics

The features list replaces the default Beyla application feature, so Beyla exports span metrics instead of OpenTelemetry semantic-convention RED metrics.

Customize the deployment

To change the chart defaults, add chart values or Beyla options to your helm-beyla.yml file and run the helm upgrade --install command again. Keep the metrics.features list and the OTLP settings in the file.

To review each chart default and what it grants, refer to Review the chart defaults.
To instrument only some namespaces or change other Beyla options, refer to Customize the Beyla configuration.
To run Beyla with fewer privileges, refer to Reduce Beyla privileges.