---
title: "Measure traffic between Cloud availability zones"
source: OpenTelemetry Documentation
source_url: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io
licence: CC-BY-4.0
domain: engineering
subdomain: opentelemetry-docs
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

> [!NOTE]
>
> This feature is currently only available in Kubernetes clusters.

Traffic between Cloud Availability Zones might incur additional costs. OBI is
able to measure it either by adding `src.zone` and `dst.zone` attributes to
regular network metrics, or by providing a separate
`obi.network.inter.zone.bytes` (OTel) / `obi_network_inter_zone_bytes_total`
(Prometheus) metric.

## Add `src.zone` and `dst.zone` attributes to regular network metrics

Source and destination availability zone attributes are disabled by default in
OBI. To enable it, explicitly add them to the list of included network
attributes in the OBI YAML configuration:

```yaml
attributes:
  select:
    obi_network_flow_bytes:
      include:
        - k8s.src.owner.name
        - k8s.src.namespace
        - k8s.dst.owner.name
        - k8s.dst.namespace
        - k8s.cluster.name
        - src.zone
        - dst.zone
```

This configuration makes inter-zone traffic visible for each
`obi_network_flow_bytes_total` metric with different `src_zone` and `dst_zone`
attributes.

If you require higher granularity in your inter-zone traffic measurement (for
example, source/destination pods or nodes), adding zone attributes would impact
the cardinality of the metric, even for traffic within the same availability
zone.

## Use the `obi.network.inter.zone` metric

Using a separate metric for inter-zone traffic reduces the metric cardinality
impact of collecting this data, because the `src.zone` and `dst.zone` attributes
are not added to the regular network metrics.

To enable the `obi.network.inter.zone` metric, add the `network_inter_zone`
option to the [OTEL_EBPF_METRICS_FEATURES](../../configure/export-data/)
configuration option, or its equivalent YAML option. For example, if OBI is
configured to export metrics via OpenTelemetry:

```yaml
metrics:
  features:
    - network
    - network_inter_zone
```

## PromQL queries to measure inter-zone traffic

Assuming that both `network` and `network_inter_zone` metric families are
enabled, you can use the following PromQL queries to measure inter-zone traffic:

Overall inter-zone traffic throughput:

```promql
sum(rate(obi_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
```

Inter-zone traffic throughput, summarized by source and destination zones:

```promql
sum(rate(obi_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval])) by(src_zone,dst_zone)
```

Overall same-zone traffic throughput:

```promql
sum(rate(obi_network_flow_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
  - sum(rate(obi_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
```

Percentage of inter-zone traffic from the total:

```promql
100 * sum(rate(obi_network_inter_zone_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
  / sum(rate(obi_network_flow_bytes_total[$__rate_interval]))
```
