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Compare Beyla and OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation

Grafana Beyla is the Grafana Labs distribution of OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI).

Grafana Labs donated the Beyla code to the OpenTelemetry project in 2025 as OBI. A community of contributors, including Grafana Labs, maintains OBI.

OBI works with the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint, and with any OpenTelemetry or Prometheus collector.

Differences between OBI and Beyla

The OBI code repository contains the eBPF auto-instrumentation code, and the Grafana Beyla code repository imports it as a library. Every feature that’s available in OBI is also available in Beyla.

Beyla also has features that OBI doesn’t, which make it easier to adopt eBPF-based auto-instrumentation in the Grafana ecosystem. Both projects are open source and vendor-neutral.

The two projects also have different release cycles. Beyla usually releases more often than OBI, so some features are available in Beyla before they’re in an OBI release.

For metrics and attributes that don’t follow an OpenTelemetry semantic convention because none exists yet, Beyla prefixes the names with beyla_ while OBI prefixes them with obi_. For example, Beyla reports the network-level flow bytes metric as beyla_network_flow_bytes_total, and OBI reports it as obi_network_flow_bytes_total.

Configuration

Beyla and OBI use the same YAML configuration schema. Most Beyla configuration examples also work with OBI, except for the features in Beyla features that are missing in OBI.

The OpenTelemetry documentation also describes how to configure OBI from a YAML configuration file.

The environment variable prefixes differ. OBI uses the OTEL_EBPF_ prefix, and Beyla uses the BEYLA_ prefix. Beyla also accepts the OTEL_EBPF_ prefix. The rest of each environment variable name is the same in both projects.

For example, to set the logging verbosity level, OBI accepts the OTEL_EBPF_LOG_LEVEL environment variable, and Beyla accepts both BEYLA_LOG_LEVEL and OTEL_EBPF_LOG_LEVEL.

OBI and Beyla both support the OpenTelemetry common environment variables, for example OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT and OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL.

Beyla features that are missing in OBI

Beyla provides the following features that OBI doesn’t:

  • Process metrics: CPU, memory, disk, and network metrics for the processes that Beyla instruments. With OBI, use the OpenTelemetry Collector Host Metrics Receiver.
  • Survey mode: Discovers your services and detects their programming languages, without instrumenting them. OBI doesn’t have a replacement.
  • Integration inside Grafana Alloy: Run Beyla as an Alloy component, and manage it with Fleet Management. With OBI, build a custom Collector with OpAMP.
  • Grafana AI Observability support: With OBI, add the required span attributes in an OpenTelemetry Collector.
  • Connecting spans for Tempo service graph metrics

To replace these features when you use OBI, and to configure OBI for Grafana Cloud, refer to Use OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation with Grafana.

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