eBPF holds the potential for true automatic instrumentation for observability. OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) is a new addition to the OpenTelemetry project, which brings the promise of a multi-language, multi-protocol auto-instrumentation, thanks to a code donation by Grafana Labs. 

Our guest today is Mario Macías, Principal Software Engineer at Grafana Labs and OpenTelemetry eBFP Instrument maintainer. Macías joins Horovits to share about OBI, its origins, capabilities and how it fits into the broader OpenTelemetry project. 

Mario holds a Ph.D. in Computer Architecture and for the last 8 years he's been working in observability at different companies. He also authored books in Spanish language, such as "Programación en Go" or "Introducción a Apache Spark".
 

You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/377cb0432bf1

Show Notes:

00:00 - episode intro

02:11 - guest intro

05:15 - Beyla origins

08:45 - OBI for app monitoring

14:46 - no-code multi-language instrumentation 

23:12 - OBI trace support

33:58 - OBI components

43:39 - Beyla project new focus

47:21 - OTel instrumentation SIG

51:34 - collaboration with other OTel components and SIGs 

54:59 - OBI roadmap

59:26 - outro 

Resources:

• OBI on GitHub: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-ebpf-instrumentation/

• Grafana Beyla donation: https://grafana.com/blog/2025/05/07/opentelemetry-ebpf-instrumentation-beyla-donation/

• eBPF for continuous profiling and the Parca project: https://medium.com/p/8afd5bafd498

• eBPF for tracing and OTel GoLang Auto-instrumentation SIG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFykWV1mLAI&list=PLd57eY2edRXz4djMETYTm-2p8WGTdoX3D

• eBPF for Kubernetes monitoring and the Pixie project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYDBj5ctKaw&list=PLd57eY2edRXz4djMETYTm-2p8WGTdoX3D&index=52
  

Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

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Mario Macías

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariomac/

Mastodon: https://masto.es/@macias

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OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.