Following a significant collaboration between Grafana Labs, Splunk, Coralogix, Odigos and many other community members, we are thrilled to announce the first alpha release of OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation, or OBI for short.
This event marks a significant milestone after the project, originally Grafana Beyla, was donated earlier this year by Grafana Labs. The development of eBPF instrumentation has significantly sped up after the project became managed under the OpenTelemetry umbrella. Many new protocols have been added, quality has improved - especially when deploying at scale, and tests are running 10 times faster. It’s a true testament to the value of the OpenTelemetry community.

OpenTelemetry's platform is an observability framework, offering insights into distributed tracing, metrics collection, and log management for cloud-native applications. Through documentation, tutorials, and community contributions, OpenTelemetry provides insights into instrumenting applications to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues. Developers and DevOps teams can learn about distributed tracing standards, telemetry data formats, and integration with observability tools to gain visibility into complex distributed systems.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) has reached its first alpha release after being donated by Grafana Labs. OBI provides zero-code, automatic instrumentation for applications across all programming languages by operating at the protocol level using eBPF technology. It captures metrics and traces without requiring code changes, restarts, or performance impact, supporting protocols like HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC, SQL, Redis, MongoDB, and Kafka. While excellent for getting started with observability and instrumenting compiled binaries, it works best when combined with traditional OpenTelemetry SDKs, particularly for complex distributed tracing scenarios in certain languages and frameworks.

OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation Marks the First Release

So what is OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation and why should you care?

Should I just use OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation for everything?

Getting started with OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation