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Application Observability quickstart

The easiest and quickest way to get started with Application Observability is a local development setup that instruments a service with a Grafana OpenTelemetry distribution and sends the telemetry data directly to the Grafana Cloud OTLP gateway.

Application Observability - Quickstart architecture

Opt-in for metrics generation

Application Observability requires Grafana Cloud metrics generation. Opt-in for Grafana Cloud metrics generation if it is not already enabled. Note, there is a cost associated with enabling this feature.

Quickstart guides

These quickstart guides are intended for local development or evaluation setups and send data directly to Grafana Cloud without a data collector.

Note

For a production setup with a data collector and troubleshooting information, consult the production documentation.

For other languages, use the upstream OpenTelemetry SDKs supported by the community.

Why should you use Beyla?

  • Easy: No need to modify or redeploy your application.
  • Legacy support: The language or language version is not supported by current OpenTelemetry SDKs.
  • Third-party application: You want to instrument third-party applications (Apache, Nginx…)
  • Performance: Your instrumentation libraries have too much impact in the performance of your applications (e.g. some Python high-load services)

Note

Beyla does not have the same capabilities as the OpenTelemetry SDKs. For example, Beyla only supports trace context propagation in Go (and in some limited cases for non-Go programs); so in most cases it only creates a single span for each non-Go service.