DNS Tracing & Metrics Via eBPF in OpenTelemetry- Endre Sara, Causely & Nikola Grcevski, Grafana Labs

Endre Sara and Nikola Grcevski present a method for integrating DNS observability directly into OpenTelemetry using eBPF.

Don't miss out! Join us at our next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Mumbai, India (18-19 June, 2026), Yokohama, Japan (29-30 July, 2026), and Shanghai, China (8-9 September, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at kubecon.io DNS Tracing & Metrics Via eBPF in OpenTelemetry - Endre Sara, Causely & Nikola Grcevski, Grafana Labs Modern cloud native applications rely heavily on DNS resolution under the hood—service discovery, external API calls, internal dependencies. Yet, DNS performance issues (latency, timeouts, misconfigurations) often remain invisible in observability stacks, hidden behind “network” or “external call” noise. This talk proposes integrating DNS observability directly into the OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) agent. We’ll cover the architectural challenges (eBPF context, semantic conventions, scalability), the proposed metrics & tracing model, and the value this adds to operators diagnosing performance or reliability issues. Attendees will walk away with lessons on how to instrument low-level system interactions (like DNS) in a cloud native world, and a blueprint for extending observability in eBPF agents beyond what exists today.