Effortless, standardised homelab observability with eBPF

Running a homelab or self-hosting means running a diverse set of applications like NextCloud, Readeck, Memos, Slash, etc. They are written in many different languages and frameworks and in general lack a good way to monitor them. The old way to monitor them involved either instrumenting them directly (which involved a LOT of work) or having a very basic blackbox_exporter enabled synthetic monitoring. Even when instrumented, each application has a different set of metrics, leading to hard to manage alerts and dashboards.

Grafana Beyla, powered by eBPF and OpenTelemetry, promises to generate first class, consistent observability signals for services regardless of the language and frameworks used. This talk will walk you through deploying Beyla for a homelab, and the challenges in having good observability even with Beyla. We will walk through:

1. Deploying Beyla in your environment
2. Setting up dashboards and exploring the data generated
3. Setting up robust alerting over the signals, especially in low, sporadic traffic (homelab) scenarios.
4. The missing signals from Beyla and how you can fill those gaps