Zero-Code Instrumentation for Go with eBPF and OpenTelemetry
Auto-instrumentation is well-established for Java, Python, and Node.js. Runtime agents hook into the interpreter or bytecode layer to inject tracing, metrics, and logging without requiring code changes. Go compiles to a static native binary, so JVM-style bytecode patching does not apply. But Go is not without options. Compile-time tools like Datadog's Orchestrion and Alibaba's opentelemetry-go-auto-instrumentation can inject tracing at build time, and eBPF provides a runtime alternative that requires no rebuild at all.
This post focuses on the eBPF approach. It attaches kernel-level probes to running Go binaries, extracting telemetry without modifying source code, recompiling, or restarting the process. OpenTelemetry now has two official projects built on this mechanism. We cover how it works, how to deploy it on Kubernetes, and where the practical limits are.