Configure Beyla metrics and traces attributes

Configure Beyla metrics and traces attributes

You can configure how Beyla decorates attributes for metrics and traces. Use the attributes top YAML section to enable and configure how attributes are set.

The Beyla exported metrics document lists the attributes you can report with each metric. Beyla reports some attributes by default and hides others to control cardinality.

For each metric, you control which attributes to see with the select subsection. This is a map where each key is the name of a metric either in its OpenTelemetry or Prometheus port, and each metric has two sub-properties: include and exclude.

• include is a list of attributes to report. Each attribute can be a name or a wildcard, for example, k8s.dst.* to include all attributes starting with k8s.dst. If you don’t provide an include list, Beyla reports the default attribute set, refer to Beyla exported metrics for more information about default attributes for a given metric
• exclude is a list of attribute names or wildcards to remove from the include list, or the default attribute set

Example:

attributes:
  select:
    beyla_network_flow_bytes:
      # limit the beyla_network_flow_bytes attributes to only the three attributes
      include:
        - beyla.ip
        - src.name
        - dst.port
    sql_client_duration:
      # report all the possible attributes but db_statement
      include: ['*']
      exclude: ['db_statement']
    http_client_request_duration:
      # report the default attribute set but exclude the Kubernetes Pod information
      exclude: ['k8s.pod.*']

Additionally, you can use wildcards as metric names to add and exclude attributes for groups of metrics with the same name. For example:

attributes:
  select:
    http_*:
      include: ['*']
      exclude: ['http_path', 'http_route']
    http_client_*:
      # override http_* exclusion
      include: ['http_path']
    http_server_*:
      # override http_* exclusion
      include: ['http_route']

In the previous example, all metrics with a name starting with http_ or http. include all possible attributes except http_path and http_route or http.path/http.route. The http_client_* and http_server_* sections override the base configuration, enabling the http_path attribute for HTTP client metrics and http_route for HTTP server metrics.

When a metric name matches multiple definitions using wildcards, exact matches take precedence over wildcard matches.

Distributed traces and context propagation

The following configuration options are accessible under the attributes.select property:

Enable context propagation

Deprecated. Use context_propagation instead.

Context propagation

Beyla injects the Traceparent header value for outgoing HTTP requests, so it can propagate any incoming context to downstream services. This context propagation works for any programming language.

For TLS encrypted HTTP requests (HTTPS), Beyla encodes the Traceparent header value at the TCP/IP packet level. Beyla must be present on both sides of the communication.

The TCP/IP packet level encoding uses Linux Traffic Control (TC). eBPF programs that also use TC must chain correctly with Beyla. For more information about chaining programs, see the Cilium compatibility documentation.

You can disable the TCP/IP level encoding and TC programs by setting context_propagation="headers". This context propagation is fully compatible with any OpenTelemetry distributed tracing library.

Context propagation values:

• all: Enable both HTTP and IP options context propagation
• headers: Enable context propagation via the HTTP headers only
• ip: Enable context propagation via the IP options field only
• disabled: Disable trace context propagation

To use this option in containerized environments (Kubernetes and Docker), you must:

• Deploy Beyla as a DaemonSet with host network access hostNetwork: true
• Volume mount the /sys/fs/cgroup path from the host as local /sys/fs/cgroup path
• Grant the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability to the Beyla container

gRPC and HTTP2 are not supported.

For an example of how to configure distributed traces in Kubernetes, see our Distributed traces with Beyla guide.

Track request headers

This option lets Beyla process any incoming Traceparent header values. If enabled, when Beyla sees an incoming server request with a Traceparent header value, it uses the provided ’trace id’ to create its own trace spans.

This option does not affect Go applications, where the Traceparent field is always processed.

Enabling this option may increase performance overhead in high request volume scenarios. This option is only useful when generating Beyla traces; it does not affect metrics.

Other attributes

The heuristic sql detect option lets Beyla detect SQL client requests by inspecting query statements, even if the protocol is not directly supported. By default, Beyla detects SQL client requests by their binary protocol format. If you use a database technology not directly supported by Beyla, you can enable this option to get database client telemetry. This option is not enabled by default, because it can create false positives, for example, if an application sends SQL text for logging through a TCP connection. Currently, Beyla natively supports the Postgres and MySQL binary protocols.

Instance ID decoration

Beyla decorates metrics and traces with a unique instance ID string, identifying each instrumented application. By default, Beyla uses the host name that runs Beyla (can be a container or Pod name), followed by the PID of the instrumented process. You can override how the instance ID is composed in the instance_id YAML subsection under the attributes top-level section.

For example:

attributes:
  instance_id:
    dns: false

DNS

If true, Beyla tries to resolve the local hostname against the network DNS. If false, it uses the local hostname.

Override hostname

If set, Beyla uses the provided string as the host part of the Instance ID instead of trying to resolve the host name. This option takes precedence over dns.

Kubernetes decorator

Enable kubernetes

If you run Beyla in a Kubernetes environment, you can configure it to decorate traces and metrics with the standard OpenTelemetry labels:

• k8s.namespace.name
• k8s.deployment.name
• k8s.statefulset.name
• k8s.replicaset.name
• k8s.daemonset.name
• k8s.node.name
• k8s.pod.name
• k8s.container.name
• k8s.pod.uid
• k8s.pod.start_time
• k8s.cluster.name

In YAML, this section is named kubernetes and is under the attributes top-level section. For example:

attributes:
  kubernetes:
    enable: true

To enable this feature, you must provide extra permissions to the Beyla Pod. See the “Configuring Kubernetes metadata decoration section” in the “Running Beyla in Kubernetes” page.

If you set this option to true, Beyla decorates metrics and traces with Kubernetes metadata. If you set it to false, Beyla disables the Kubernetes metadata decorator. If you set it to autodetect, Beyla tries to detect if it is running inside Kubernetes and enables metadata decoration if so.

Kubeconfig path

This is a standard Kubernetes configuration environment variable. Use it to tell Beyla where to find the Kubernetes configuration to communicate with the Kubernetes Cluster. Usually, you do not need to change this value.

Disable informers

The accepted value is a list that might contain node and service.

This option lets you selectively disable some Kubernetes informers, which continuously listen to the Kubernetes API to get the metadata needed for decorating network metrics or application metrics and traces.

When you deploy Beyla as a DaemonSet in very large clusters, all the Beyla instances creating multiple informers might overload the Kubernetes API.

Disabling some informers causes reported metadata to be incomplete, but reduces the load on the Kubernetes API.

You cannot disable the Pods informer. To do that, disable the whole Kubernetes metadata decoration.

Meta restrict local node

If true, Beyla stores Pod and Node metadata only from the node where the Beyla instance runs.

This option decreases the memory used to store metadata, but some metrics such as network bytes or service graph metrics won’t include metadata from destination pods on a different node.

Informers sync timeout

This is the maximum time Beyla waits to get all the Kubernetes metadata before starting to decorate metrics and traces. If this timeout is reached, Beyla starts normally, but the metadata attributes might be incomplete until all the Kubernetes metadata is updated in the background.

Informers resync period

Beyla immediately receives any update on resources’ metadata. In addition, Beyla periodically resynchronizes all Kubernetes metadata at the frequency you specify with this property. Higher values reduce the load on the Kubernetes API service.

Service name template

You can template service names using Go templates. This lets you create conditional or extended service names.

The following context is available to the template:

Meta: (*informer.ObjectMeta)
  Name: (string)
  Namespace: (string)
  Labels:
    label1: lv1
    label2: lv2
  Annotations:
    Anno1: av1
    Anno2: av2
  Pod: (*PodInfo)
  ...

ContainerName: (string)

You can find the full object and structure in the kubecache informer.pb.go source file.

Service name template examples:

{{- .Meta.Namespace }}/{{ index .Meta.Labels "app.kubernetes.io/name" }}/{{ index .Meta.Labels "app.kubernetes.io/component" -}}{{ if .ContainerName }}/{{ .ContainerName -}}{{ end -}}

or

{{- .Meta.Namespace }}/{{ index .Meta.Labels "app.kubernetes.io/name" }}/{{ index .Meta.Labels "app.kubernetes.io/component" -}}

In this example, only the first line is used and trimmed to prevent white space in the service name.

Extra group attributes

Beyla allows you to enhance your metrics with custom attributes using the extra_group_attributes configuration. This gives you the flexibility to include additional metadata in your metrics, beyond the standard set.

To use this feature, specify the group name and the list of attributes you want to include in that group.

Currently, only the k8s_app_meta group is supported. This group contains Kubernetes-specific metadata such as Pod name, namespace, container name, Pod UID, and more.

Example configuration:

attributes:
  kubernetes:
    enable: true
  extra_group_attributes:
    k8s_app_meta: ['k8s.app.version']

In this example:

• Adding k8s.app.version to the resource_labels block causes the k8s.app.version label to appear in the metrics.
• You can also define annotations with the prefix resource.opentelemetry.io/ and suffix k8s.app.version in your Kubernetes manifests, these annotations are automatically included in the metrics.

The following table describes the default group attributes.

And the following table describes the metrics and their associated groups. |