Measure traffic between Cloud availability zones

Measure traffic between Cloud availability zones

Traffic between Cloud Availability Zones might incur additional costs. Beyla is able to measure it either by adding src.zone and dst.zone attributes to regular network metrics, or by providing a separate beyla.network.inter.zone.bytes (OTEL) / beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total (Prometheus) metric.

Add src.zone and dst.zone attributes to regular network metrics

Source and destination availability zone attributes are disabled by default in Beyla. To enable it, explicitly add them to the list of included network attributes in the Beyla YAML configuration:

attributes:
  select:
    beyla_network_flow_bytes:
      include:
        - k8s.src.owner.name
        - k8s.src.namespace
        - k8s.dst.owner.name
        - k8s.dst.namespace
        - k8s.cluster.name
        - src.zone
        - dst.zone

This configuration makes inter-zone traffic visible for each beyla_network_flow_bytes_total metric with different src_zone and dst_zone attributes.

If you require higher granularity in your inter-zone traffic measurement (for example, source/destination pods or nodes), adding zone attributes would impact the cardinality of the metric, even for traffic within the same availability zone.

Use the beyla.network.inter.zone metric

Using a separate metric for inter-zone traffic reduces the metric cardinality impact of collecting this data, because the src.zone and dst.zone attributes are not added to the regular network metrics.

To enable the beyla.network.inter.zone metric, add the network_inter_zone option to the BEYLA_OTEL_METRICS_FEATURES or BEYLA_PROMETHEUS_FEATURES configuration option, or its equivalent YAML options. For example, if Beyla is configured to export metrics via OpenTelemetry:

otel_metrics_export:
  features:
    - network
    - network_inter_zone

PromQL queries to measure inter-zone traffic

Assuming that both network and network_inter_zone metric families are enabled, you can use the following PromQL queries to measure inter-zone traffic:

Overall inter-zone traffic throughput:

sum(rate(beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))

Inter-zone traffic throughput, summarized by source and destination zones:

sum(rate(beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval])) by(src_zone,dst_zone)

Overall same-zone traffic throughput:

sum(rate(beyla_network_flow_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
  - sum(rate(beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))

Percentage of inter-zone traffic from the total:

100 * sum(rate(beyla_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
  / sum(rate(beyla_network_flow_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))