Use a workpad in Canvas to jumpstart your APM efforts and present your data in a big, bold, and beautiful way — in real time.

<p>Since <a href="https://www.elastic.co/what-is/kibana-canvas">we launched Canvas in 2018</a>, we have seen tons of our users <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/monitoring-airport-security-operations-with-canvas-and-elasticsearch">create beautiful dashboards that tell stories with Elasticsearch data</a>. In the spirit of making it even easier to get started, we are creating templates that you can import and get instantly beautiful dashboards for all the data the Elastic Stack captures.&nbsp;
</p><p>In this article we’ll show you how to use a Canvas template to observe Elastic APM KPIs that complement the current APM home page and tools. Our goal is to release updates to this template, as well as new versions of other <a href="https://www.elastic.co/observability">observability</a>, <a href="https://www.elastic.co/security">security</a>, and <a href="https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search">enterprise search</a> templates, in the future. We are making our products more integrated and ready for you to use with minimal effort right out of the box. <em>Solutions templates </em>are part of this initiative, and while this particular template needs to be downloaded and installed in Canvas, we are working on ways to deliver templates and updates inside of all Kibana apps, so stay tuned.
</p><h2>What is Elastic APM?</h2><p><a href="https://www.elastic.co/apm">Elastic APM</a> provides deep insights into the health and performance of your applications so you can troubleshoot and get to the root cause of a problem quickly. Along with these detailed insights, APM surfaces the KPIs that your DevOps and monitoring teams need to identify, investigate, and resolve issues.&nbsp;
</p><p>Canvas extends the out-of-the-box APM visualization capabilities by helping you build customized dashboards to surface your KPI data in any way that suits your needs. With Canvas templates, we are making it even easier for you to get started on your personalization/customization journey. The <strong>Elastic APM Service KPI template</strong> makes it easy to create highly customized and beautiful Canvas workpads that surface all of your service KPI data in one place.&nbsp;
</p><h2>Using the Elastic APM Service KPI template</h2><p>By the end of this article, you’ll have imported and connected the template to your data, enabling you to get better visibility into your APM data. The workpad uses the four golden signals of monitoring: latency (the time it takes to send a request and receive a response), traffic (a measure of the number of requests across a network), errors (misconfigurations, broken dependencies, etc.), and saturation (the load on your network and server resources).
</p><h3>Prerequisites</h3><p>You must be using an instance with the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) 1.5 or later enabled. If this is new to you, please visit our <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/index.html">ECS documentation</a>, and then come back here when it’s set up. You also need APM data in your system, which is by default called apm-*. You can still download the Canvas template, but you’ll have to change around the data sources for each element. This might be what you want, so by all means go ahead.
</p><h3>Download and import the APM Canvas workpad</h3><p>You can download and import the template as a workpad. A workpad can be edited and/or cloned. If you overwrite the original template you can always import again.
</p><h3>Import as a workpad</h3><ol>
	<li>Download the <a href="https://assets.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt702d5655279f4e98/5f3d8a2a1020421e0b078218/blog-canvas-for-o11y-apm-template.json?elektra=blog-canvas-for-o11y-apm">Canvas APM JSON file here</a>&nbsp;(<strong></strong>Right-click &gt; Save As).&nbsp;Pay attention to where you put it — we’ll need it in a minute.</li>
	<li>From Kibana, open <strong>Canvas, </strong>then<strong> Import workpad JSON file</strong>.</li>
	<li>Browse for the workpad JSON file you just downloaded, then click <strong>Open.</strong></li>
	<li>Open the workpad.</li>
	<li>If this does not yield something similar to the result above, see the FAQ below.</li>
</ol><h3>Visualize your APM data in Canvas</h3><p>And that’s it! Now you can visualize your APM data in this prebuilt Canvas workpad. If you’ve never used Canvas before, or if you’ve only used it a little, we encourage you to explore. Make changes, tune it for your data, experiment with all the options. And if you break anything, don’t worry — you can just delete the workpad and start over.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt10b6a0c4910f9a2b/5f457d8da9d4814afda14049/blog-canvas-observability.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt10b6a0c4910f9a2b" alt="blog-canvas-observability.png"></p><h2>Observability and beyond</h2><p>Canvas is a powerful tool for making robust, real-time visualization of all of your data, not just APM. After you’ve had a chance to get to know the APM template, we encourage you to add data from your other data sources. Correlating APM traces with <a href="https://www.elastic.co/log-monitoring">logs</a> and <a href="https://www.elastic.co/infrastructure-monitoring">metrics</a> is the only way to achieve full observability. Not using Elastic APM yet? Try it out for yourself in a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/service">free trial of Elasticsearch Service</a> or explore sample data in our <a href="https://demo.elastic.co/app/apm">live Elastic APM demo</a>.
</p><h2>Frequently asked questions (FAQ)</h2><p>Q: I can’t load the template or can’t find it.
</p><p>A: The file might be corrupt. Try downloading it again. The file may also not be in the spot you thought it was. Make sure you put it in a spot where you have rights to access it.&nbsp;&nbsp;
</p><p>Q: After loading, why does the template have a bunch of errors and exclamation marks?
</p><p>A: The data for elements with errors and exclamation marks is likely not connected correctly in the data tab of each element. You’ll have to change the queries on the data tab, and perhaps toggle some things on the display tab to reflect the proper index and field names, especially if you’ve changed them or if you are not using ECS. Note that <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/index.html">ECS</a> with apm-* indices are prerequisites for this workpad to work out of the box. For information about how to connect your data, refer to <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/canvas.html#add-canvas-elements">Add elements</a>.
</p><p>Q: Where can I get support on this template?
</p><p>A: You can try <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co">discuss.elastic.co</a> or our <a href="https://ela.st/slack">Elastic Slack channel</a>.
</p>

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Bold, insightful, real-time: Visualizing APM data with Canvas in Kibana

Elastic announces the ability to integrate OpenTelemetry traces into Elastic APM with ease.

<p>We are pleased to announce the availability of the Elastic OpenTelemetry integration —&nbsp; available on <a href="/elasticsearch/service">Elastic Cloud</a>, or when you <a href="/downloads/apm">download Elastic APM</a>. This integration continues our commitment to openness by embracing open standards support for the evolving OpenTelemetry standard for observability
</p><h2>Commitment to open standards support</h2><p>From open source to open code, <a href="/blog/elasticsearch-free-open-limitless">openness is in our DNA here at Elastic</a>. We embrace that openness not only from the&nbsp;point of view of the code we write and ship, but also the data we ingest. We have always been on the forefront of embracing open standards as a way to provide our users the flexibility to choose how they want to ship their data to Elasticsearch and leverage the capabilities of the Elastic Stack. This commitment to supporting open standards is reflected in our support for other open standards and other popular open source projects such as&nbsp;<a href="/what-is/prometheus-monitoring">Prometheus</a>, <a href="/blog/distributed-tracing-opentracing-and-elastic-apm">OpenTracing</a>, <a href="/blog/elastic-apm-adopts-w3c-tracecontext">W3C Trace-Context,</a> and <a href="/blog/exploring-jaeger-traces-with-elastic-apm">Jaeger</a>.
</p><p>In early 2019, OpenTracing and&nbsp;OpenCensus embarked on a journey to standardize APIs and build a complete solution,&nbsp;making&nbsp;it easier for users to capture traces and telemetry across all their instrumented services. Having built support for OpenTracing into <a href="/apm">Elastic APM</a>, we actively participated as a member of the OpenTelemetry project. Today, we are excited to announce the ability to integrate OpenTelemetry traces into Elastic APM with ease.
</p><h2>What is OpenTelemetry?</h2><p><a href="https://opentelemetry.io/">OpenTelemetry</a> is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)&nbsp;sandbox project that provides vendor-neutral, language-specific agents, SDKs, and APIs that you can use to collect distributed traces, metrics, and log data from all your monitored applications. OpenTelemetry agents are capable of automatically instrumenting application code to surface performance data that is important to help you&nbsp;understand the health of your services — providing flexibility to application developers to pick and choose which agents monitor their applications.&nbsp;
</p><h2>How to get started with Elastic APM and OpenTelemetry</h2><p>It's easy to ingest your OpenTelemetry agent data with Elastic! To add support for OpenTelemetry to Elastic APM, we’ve extended the <a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib">OpenTelemetry collector contrib repository</a> and added the&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/master/exporter/elasticexporter">Elastic APM exporter</a>. The&nbsp;exporter translates the OpenTelemetry trace data collected from your services to Elastic’s protocol&nbsp;before sending the data to Elastic APM via the APM server. Extending the OpenTelemetry collector means that no changes are needed in your instrumented services in order to begin using Elastic APM.&nbsp; Just drop the Elastic exporter into your OpenTelemetry setup and view your trace data in Elastic APM.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltfcc489b6dec8f1d1/5efca03360ea214019a4db4f/opentelemetryachitecture.png" data-sys-asset-uid="bltfcc489b6dec8f1d1" alt="" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><p>Once you have the exporter deployed and are sending data to Elastic,&nbsp;you can visualize this data in the APM app just like you would any other trace captured by the Elastic APM agents.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blta78ca81b47275c34/5efca040b2975d3d706ad485/distributedtrace.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blta78ca81b47275c34" alt="" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><p>The OpenTelemetry collector contrib repository includes a simple <a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/master/examples">example</a> to get started.&nbsp; Just follow the <a href="/guide/en/apm/get-started/7.8/open-telemetry-elastic-get-started.html">getting started guide</a> to add Elastic APM as an exporter to the example.
</p><h2>Open Instrumentation flexibility</h2><p>By combining OpenTelemetry with the <a href="/observability">Elastic Observability</a> solution and the Elastic Stack, you have the flexibility to choose which agents (Elastic or OpenTelemetry) you want to instrument your applications with. Regardless of what you pick, you can visualize end-to-end distributed traces in the APM app. You also get the benefits of having a unified solution to visualize traces alongside metrics and logs, powerful analytics, and capabilities like machine learning and alerting with flexibility and scale.
</p><p>As OpenTelemetry evolves to include metrics and logs, we will work on enhancing our support so you can use our agents and Beats seamlessly with the OpenTelemetry agents. In the meantime, if you are looking for capturing metrics or logs you can use <a href="/beats/metricbeat">Metricbeat</a> and <a href="/beats/filebeat">Filebeat</a> modules to provide you with complete visibility to monitor your stack.<br>
</p><h2>Try it for yourself</h2><p><a href="/downloads/apm">Download</a> and run Elastic APM locally, or spin up the latest release in a <a href="/cloud/elasticsearch-service/signup">free trial of Elastic Cloud</a>. See our Elastic APM <a href="/guide/en/apm/get-started/master/install-and-run.html">getting started guide</a> for step-by-step instructions and accelerate integrating OpenTelemetry traces into Elastic APM by reviewing the OpenTelemetry integration <a href="/guide/en/apm/get-started/7.8/open-telemetry-elastic.html">overview guide</a>.&nbsp;
</p><p>You can also engage with a passionate community of Elastic APM users on our <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co/c/apm/58">Discuss forum</a> and on <a href="https://github.com/elastic/apm/issues">GitHub</a>.
</p>

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Elastic introduces OpenTelemetry integration

Elastic APM 7.8.0 released with smarter, ML-driven service maps, an annotation API, and a lot of new out-of-the-box instrumentations across our agents

<p>We are pleased to announce the release of Elastic APM 7.8.0 —&nbsp; available on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or when you <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/apm">download</a> the Elastic Stack. This release brings exciting new changes to the APM app with smarter service maps, an annotation API, and a lot of new out-of-the-box instrumentations across our agents.
</p> <strong><h2>Smarter service maps with contextual health information</h2></strong><p>Service maps just got a whole lot smarter in 7.8! Service maps are now integrated with machine learning anomaly detection jobs, which means that once enabled, the maps will surface the real-time health of all your instrumented services.
</p><p>We see a lot of cloud and app ops facing challenges while monitoring complex modern&nbsp;applications, continuously digging for a root cause. Being able to quickly pinpoint troubled services along with the health of all upstream and downstream services will help you fix issues before they impact end users.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt94247646aa42a3d9/5ee1231a58284c442bf7fbb6/smarter-service-maps.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="blt94247646aa42a3d9" alt="smarter-service-maps.gif">
</p><strong><h2>Track your deployments — your way!</h2></strong><p>In 7.6 we introduced deployment annotations on APM charts. With support for deployment annotations, it is easy to identify performance issues that might have been introduced by a new deployment or track the performance of your applications across the different deployed versions over time. This release makes deployment tracking infinitely more customizable. The <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/7.8/apm-annotation-api.html#apm-annotation-api">Annotation API</a> allows you to integrate with your favorite CI/CD pipeline tools to track&nbsp;deployments. Alternatively, you can also call the Annotation&nbsp;API to annotate your charts with other interesting events that you may want to track along with your application performance. Check out <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/7.8/apm-annotation-api.html#apm-annotation-api">our documentation</a> to help you get started with&nbsp;annotations in Elastic APM!
</p><p>For example, to set the release to "2020-06-01,"&nbsp;using <code>curl</code> and the required headers (substituting the actual password), we can run:
</p><pre class="prettyprint">curl http://localhost:5601/api/apm/services/opbeans-java/annotation \ 
--user elastic:&lt;password&gt; \ 
--header "kbn-xsrf: API" \ 
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \ 
--data ' 
{ 
    "@timestamp": "2020-06-01T11:12:26.000Z",  
    "service": { 
        "version": "2020-06-01", 
        "environment": "production" 
    }, 
    "message": "2020-06-01", 
    "tags": [ 
        "elastic.co", "customer" 
    ] 
} 
'
</pre><p>To add a deployment annotation:
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt9db71f874f2a0970/5ee122f3f2c45903a4be0c25/deployment-annotation.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt9db71f874f2a0970" alt="deployment-annotation.png">
</p><p><br>
</p><strong><h2>Layer real user monitoring in the Maps app<br></h2></strong><p>Real user monitoring (RUM) is about understanding how your website is performing on the devices of real users. In production, there’s no one single “load time”; the experience a user has is heavily influenced by which device and browser they are using and where they are physically located.
</p><p>To make it easier to geographically visualize the performance of a website that’s instrumented with the Elastic RUM&nbsp;Agent, we’re very excited to announce the release of a dedicated Observability&nbsp;solution layer in the Maps app.&nbsp;
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltd1964396a640567f/5ee12261711ec84420520124/apm-map-layers.png" data-sys-asset-uid="bltd1964396a640567f" alt="apm-map-layers.png">
</p><p><br>
</p><p>WIth this new feature, all it takes is three clicks to instantly gain easy-to-understand insight about your users’ experience and where they are coming from. And, if you want to take it further, there are advanced configuration options available. This kind of visualization is fantastic for spotting poorly optimized network connections (time to invest in a CDN?) or unexpected sources of traffic (maybe it’s time to tweak that targeted advertising campaign?). Give it a go yourself and see what insight is hidden in the data you already have.&nbsp;
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltd885941f58035297/5ee122a8a1cefa3b5ed1d2f6/apm-rum-map.png" data-sys-asset-uid="bltd885941f58035297" alt="apm-rum-map.png">
</p><strong><h2>Support for SqlClient in .NET APM Agent</h2></strong><p>In the theme of constantly improving the quality of data collected by our APM agents, we recently added out-of-the-box visibility into the SqlClient calls made from .NET applications.
</p><p><a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-the-new-microsoftdatasqlclient/">SqlClient</a> is the ADO.NET provider you use in your applications to access SQL server and Azure SQL databases. Now it is even easier to see those SQL databases both on the service maps and inside the distributed traces, which can be a lifesaver&nbsp;when analyzing performance issues caused by poor-performing SQL queries.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt97c52505c5018282/5ee39962b522543a8d52723c/apm-sqlclient.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt97c52505c5018282" alt="apm-sqlclient.jpg"></p><p>In order to get started, you only need to upgrade to the latest version of the .NET agent <a href="https://www.nuget.org/packages/Elastic.Apm.NetCoreAll">NetCoreAll</a> NuGet package and re-deploy the application.<br></p> <strong><h2>Try it out!</h2></strong><p>You can access the 7.8.0 Elastic APM app&nbsp;on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud, or you can <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">download</a> the Elastic Stack. Grab the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/apm">APM Server</a> (or leverage the one included with an Elasticsearch Service account), instrument your applications with the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html">APM agents</a>, and start monitoring your applications.
</p> <strong><h2>Related blogs</h2></strong><ul>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-observability-7-8-0-released">Elastic Observability 7.8 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-logs-7-8-0-released">Elastic Logs 7.8 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-metrics-7-8-0-released">Elastic Metrics 7.8 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-uptime-monitoring-7-8-0-released">Elastic Uptime 7.8 released</a></li>
</ul>

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Elastic APM 7.8.0 released

Elastic APM 7.7.0 released with service maps, async profiler, and more

<p>We are pleased to announce the release of Elastic APM 7.7.0 —&nbsp;available on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or when you <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/apm">download</a>&nbsp;the Elastic Stack. This is a massive release for APM which brings a lot of exciting new features to the APM app,&nbsp;including service maps, inferred span support, alerting, agent central configuration, and custom links.
</p> <strong><h2>Service maps</h2></strong><p>Trying to do an impact analysis during an outage but don’t know where to look? Well, look no further! The 7.7 version of the stack release adds service maps as a beta feature to the Elastic APM app. This means that you have access to a real time, high-level view of all your Elastic instrumented services. You can easily leverage these maps to identify how your services are connected, what external services or databases your services might be calling, along with high-level metrics that can help you decipher the health of your services. This platinum-level feature is available from both a global (all Elastic instrumented services) and per-monitored-service level, giving you the flexibility to pick where you want to begin your troubleshooting journey. Service maps serve as a graphical requirement mapping of your services, allowing you to see the dependencies between your applications and services, internal and external, enabling you to identify connections that you didn't even know existed. As long as you are using supported agent versions in your application, you do not need to do anything to get started with maps. Check out our <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/7.7/service-maps.html">documentation</a> to learn more!</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt1652ae2bfc2874bc/5ea09372f923401150072b2b/apm-service-maps.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt1652ae2bfc2874bc" alt="apm-service-maps.png"></p><strong><h2>Inferred spans with async profiler</h2></strong><p>Adding instrumentation to gain visibility into your services can be an iterative process that requires you to configure and specify everything you want visibility into upfront. In 7.7, our Java Agent now adds the capability to <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/java/master/java-method-monitoring.html">surface additional spans</a> that show you granular method-level information about your services, greatly reducing that upfront instrumentation effort, while still greatly reducing time to diagnose the root cause of errors and slow performing code, even in complex systems. This capability is powered by a low overhead async profiler in the agent that can continuously run even in your production environments (Yes! You read that right!) and surface method-level insights. Check our <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/from-distributed-tracing-to-distributed-profiling-with-elastic-apm">blog post</a> to learn all the awesomeness that is this feature.
</p> <strong><h2>Alerting</h2></strong><p>The 7.7 release also introduces <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/7.7/apm-alerts.html">turnkey integrations</a> with Kibana alerting (in beta). This integration makes it super easy for you to configure your threshold alerts for your service response time or error rate with the click of a button. Click the alert you want to create, pick the actions you want to take when the alert is triggered, and you are done! When the thresholds are violated, you will be notified based on the action you picked while configuring.
</p><strong><h2>Agent central config</h2></strong><p>Managing agent configurations via YAML files is never easy. A small mistake (was that a tab or spaces?) in your YAML file can cause you to spin cycles debugging the file. With the 7.7 release, we have added the ability to configure most of the agent configuration properties in the APM app right in&nbsp;Kibana. The ability to configure these settings from Kibana allows you to easily edit an agent’s configuration without having to deal with individual agent configuration files. With a feedback indicator, you can also quickly identify if your changes have been applied to the selected services.&nbsp;
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt7fcb0c0d1f5152f5/5e98b8a26d0d9c325b210ac3/image2.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt7fcb0c0d1f5152f5" alt="image2.png"></p><strong><h2>Custom links</h2></strong><p>With 7.7 we have also added a capability allowing you to create dynamic custom links based on your specific APM data. These custom links&nbsp;allow you to do things like populate GitHub or Jira issues or even link to another Kibana dashboard for further analysis. These custom links can be filtered to only appear in the APM app for relevant services, environments, transaction types, or transaction names. Check out our <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/7.7/custom-links.html">documentation</a> for ideas and examples of how you could leverage this feature to streamline your workflows.
</p> <strong><h2>Try it out!</h2></strong><p>You can access the 7.7.0 Elastic APM app on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud, or you can <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">download</a> the Elastic Stack. Grab the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/apm">APM Server</a> (or leverage the one included with an Elasticsearch Service account), instrument your applications with the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html">APM agents</a>, and start monitoring your applications.
</p><strong><h2>Related blogs</h2></strong><ul>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-observability-7-7-0-released">Elastic Observability 7.7 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-logs-7-7-0-released">Elastic Logs 7.7 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-metrics-7-7-0-released">Elastic Metrics 7.7 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-uptime-monitoring-7-7-0-released">Elastic Uptime 7.7 released</a></li>
</ul>

Elastic APM 7.6.0 brings exciting new changes including support for messaging frameworks, while adding direct ingest for Jaeger-instrumented applications

<p>We are pleased to announce the release of Elastic APM 7.6.0 —&nbsp; available on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or as part of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">default distribution</a> of the Elastic Stack. This release brings exciting new changes, including support for <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/java/master/supported-technologies-details.html#supported-messaging-frameworks">messaging frameworks</a>, while increasing our support for other open ecosystems.
</p><h2>Jaeger intake</h2><p>Jaeger, a CNCF graduated project, is a popular choice for end-to-end request tracing that is compatible with OpenTelemetry standards, and we are excited to announce that&nbsp;Elastic APM now acts as a Jaeger intake.&nbsp; This enhancement&nbsp;enables you to ingest your Jaeger-instrumented traces directly into Elasticsearch via the APM Server without needing to change already instrumented code, leveraging your existing Jaeger instrumentation. This means your trace information will be stored in Elasticsearch and you will be able visualize your Jaeger agent-captured traces in the APM app. Check out <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/server/7.6/jaeger.html">our documentation</a> to learn more and get started.</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltebafc48b46d2d794/5e3c5bcb0022f52efa9ebb11/image4.png" data-sys-asset-uid="bltebafc48b46d2d794" alt="image4.png"></p><h2>Deployment annotations</h2><p>The 7.6 release also provides you with additional visibility into your deployments. APM app charts are now&nbsp;annotated automatically when a new deployment is detected by the agents monitoring your services. These annotations&nbsp;provide you a way to quickly visualize and identify if your new deployment has increased response times for an end user, or if the memory/CPU footprint of your application has increased, allowing you to manage your deployments more effectively.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blte45711c17e163667/5e3c5be407f98b677fe34ee0/image2.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blte45711c17e163667" alt="image2.png"></p><h2>Messaging framework support</h2><p>Using Kafka to connect your services but unable to see an end-to-end trace? In this release we have added support for Kafka and JMS to the Java agent. This means that you will now be able to visualize an&nbsp;end-to-end trace, including the messaging framework that was used to communicate between two services. In addition to the spans in the distributed trace, you can see the time your request spent waiting in the queue. Refer to <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/java/master/supported-technologies-details.html#supported-messaging-frameworks">our documentation</a>&nbsp;for further details on this feature.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blta3171fded6f77983/5e3c5c01af081c680c6b2c25/image3.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blta3171fded6f77983" alt="image3.png"></p><p>Including detailed information per transaction:<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt49818b58641d6866/5e3c5c2c28bcbb6ab5fa3e33/image1.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt49818b58641d6866" alt="image1.png"></p><h2>APM SIEM integration</h2><p>HTTP data collected with your APM agents will now be available in the SIEM app. This will enable you to look for security threats in your APM data. In addition to the APM data being available in the SIEM app, we also have included additional machine learning jobs that can run against this data and apprise you when a security threat is detected. These custom machine learning jobs can help Identify requests from scripts, detect forbidden requests,&nbsp;requests accessing forbidden methods, and allow you to query for a specific attack by a dedicated tool and version.&nbsp;
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt4a1e3f3d1ba7d021/5e417bc1e029072f7b62b44d/APM_in_SIEM.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="blt4a1e3f3d1ba7d021" alt="APM_in_SIEM.gif"></p><h2>UI index configuration</h2><p>In 7.5 release we shipped support for configuring your APM agent properties from the Kibana APM app. With the 7.6 release we have added support for configuring APM indices from Kibana, allowing you to customize your environment even further.&nbsp;
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt75f178b4d2ff00b5/5e3c5dff0022f52efa9ebb25/apm-index-config.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt75f178b4d2ff00b5" alt="apm-index-config.png"></p><h2>API key authentication</h2><p>The 7.6 release enables API key authentication for your APM agents. This will provide you with greater flexibility when managing your services in Elastic APM by allowing for multiple tokens at the same time, adding/removing tokens without needing to restart the APM Server, and allowing for finer authorization rules going for specific services or teams.&nbsp;
</p><h2>Try it out!</h2><p>You can access the 7.6.0 Elastic APM application on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud, or you can download it as part of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">default distribution</a> of the Elastic Stack. Grab the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/apm">APM Server</a> (or leverage the one included with an Elasticsearch Service account), instrument your applications with the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html">APM agents</a>, and start monitoring your applications.
</p><h2>Related blogs</h2><ul>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-observability-7-6-0-released">Elastic Observability 7.6 released</a></li>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-logs-7-6-0-released">Elastic Logs 7.6 released</a></li>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-metrics-7-6-0-released">Elastic Metrics 7.6 released</a></li>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-uptime-monitoring-7-6-0-released">Elastic Uptime 7.6 released</a></li>
</ul>

Elastic APM 7.6.0 released: Jaeger intake, messaging support, and more

Elastic APM 7.6.0 released

Elastic APM 7.5 features simplified configuration and allows for navigation between logs and additional config options to administer your APM agents.

<p>We are pleased to announce the release of Elastic APM 7.5.0 — available on the <a href="/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or as part of the <a href="/downloads/">default distribution</a> of Elastic Stack. This release brings exciting new changes to the APM app that simplify APM configuration and allows for navigation between logs and additional config options to administer your APM agents.
</p> <strong><h2>Easier navigation between APM traces and logs</h2></strong><p>Navigation from APM traces to logs was introduced in 7.4. In 7.5 this feature is significantly expanded, with support for writing the trace unique identifier (ID) into log messages for all Elastic APM agents. APM agents write these structured logs directly in Elastic Common Schema (ECS) format. The Elastic APM and Logs apps leverage these correlation IDs introduced by the agents to navigate between traces and logs in a deterministic manner. This capability simplifies the troubleshooting experience by bringing together trace and log data related to a slow or failed APM transaction with the click of a button. Check out the <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html">agent docs</a> for information on supported logging libraries.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt8005be548b4a5a97/5dcc9af5ff19200218970faa/apm-7-5-agents-blog.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt8005be548b4a5a97" alt="Improved graphs with correlation IDs" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><strong><h2>Aggregate service breakdown charts are now GA!</h2></strong><p>Breakdown graphs were added in 7.3 to the APM app. These graphs help you easily visualize where your application are spending most of their time. In 7.5 these graphs are now GA, which means you can now see the aggregated performance breakdown of your applications and easily identify hotspots for all your applications (not available for .NET agent).
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltabc99114bc0c2851/5dcc9b66288a950182779850/apm-7-5-breakdown-blog.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="bltabc99114bc0c2851" alt="Aggregate service breakdown graphs" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><strong><h2>More config options in the APM app</h2></strong><p>In 7.3 we shipped support for configuring sampling rate for your services from the APM app. In 7.5 we've added support for two additional configurations — one that allows you to configure the capture body of transactions, and another to configure the maximum number of spans that can be sent up from the agent. The ability to configure these settings from the UI allows you to easily edit an agent’s configuration without needing to change the individual agent configuration files. In addition to these configuration options, the UI also has visual indicators that provide feedback and let you know if a particular configuration was applied successfully.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt54d3530dc865edd5/5dcc9b9f1c8e0c0258b6090b/apm-7-5-settings-blog.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt54d3530dc865edd5" alt="Additional configuration options" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><strong><h2>JVM instance level visibility</h2></strong><p>In 7.5 it's also super easy to troubleshoot your individual JVM instances. A brand new tabular view displays all of your reporting JVMs — along with relevant metric data — to help identity which instances are running hot or are low on resources. Want to dig deeper into a single JVM instance to gain even more insight? Just click one of the JVMs to see more data on CPU, heap/non-heap memory usage, thread count, and garbage collection information for that specific JVM, along with metadata for that instance.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt7bc6fc5a675c8196/5dcc9bbb1bfdeb01f7b443f4/apm-7-5-instance-level-blogs.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt7bc6fc5a675c8196" alt="JVM instance level visibility" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><strong><h2>Try it out!</h2></strong><p>You can access Elastic APM 7.5.0 on the <a href="/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud, or you can download it as part of the <a href="/downloads/">default distribution</a> of the Elastic Stack. Grab the <a href="/downloads/apm">APM Server</a> (or leverage the one included with an Elasticsearch Service account), instrument your applications with the <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html">APM agents</a>, and start monitoring your applications.
</p><p><strong>Related blogs:</strong>
</p><ul>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-observability-7-5-0-released">Elastic Observability 7.5 released</a>		</li>	
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-logs-7-5-0-released">Elastic Logs 7.5.0 released</a></li>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-metrics-7-5-0-released">Elastic Metrics 7.5.0 released</a></li>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-uptime-monitoring-7-5-0-released">Elastic Uptime 7.5.0 released</a></li>
	
</ul>

Elastic APM 7.5.0 released

Elastic APM 7.4.0 is out now, with structured filters, geo visualizations of RUM data, Angular instrumentation, improved Logs app integration, and more.

<p>We are pleased to announce the release of Elastic APM 7.4.0 —&nbsp; available on the <a href="/products/elasticsearch/service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or as part of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">default distribution</a> of Elastic Stack. This release brings exciting new changes to the APM app UI, like structured filters for easier navigation, lots of real user monitoring awesomeness including&nbsp;performance visualization by geo-location, and support for Angular single page applications, along with APM agent updates.
</p> <h2>Structured filters&nbsp;</h2><p>The ability to filter transactions by type, result or host/agent name provide you with an easier and a powerful way to explore your APM data. With the 7.4 release, we have rolled out support for structured filters in the curated APM app UI. This means you can slice and dice your data by quickly selecting the filter options available in the UI.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt541f4ad6ed8f4f56/5d83e981faca966db1c4c5a9/apm-7-4-0-structured-filters.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt541f4ad6ed8f4f56" alt="apm-7-4-0-structured-filters.jpg"></p><h2>Lots of RUM awesomeness!</h2><p>In the previous release we had enabled geo-ip and user agent pipelines by default, to capture geolocation and user agent data. With this release we have added a brand new geo-location performance visualization chart to the curated APM app UI. This visualization will make it super easy for you to visualize performance information about your end users' experience based on their geo-location.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt7a9cfb7853a2962e/5d83dfc200703b6e61881625/apm-7-4-0-rum-geo.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt7a9cfb7853a2962e" alt="Geo location visualization with Elastic APM RUM data" style="display: block; margin: auto;"></p><p>We have also further strengthened our support for Single Page Applications (SPA) by adding out of the box Angular instrumentation. This means that you can now use the RUM agent to instrument your SPA written in Angular.js without the need to manually create or rename transactions. Check out the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/rum-js/4.x/angular-integration.html">Angular integration doc</a> and instrument your Angular SPA today!</p> <h2>Better APM to Logs integration</h2><p>An integrated way to navigate between APM and the Logs app is particularly helpful in troubleshooting complex issues. With this release, APM agents now have the ability to log trace-ids thereby enabling you to navigate from the distributed trace to the logs via the APM App UI without losing context. Check out the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html">agent docs</a> for information on logging libraries supported.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt71a5bf7dc6e1078d/5d83e9c59618e12ee7e99af2/TraceID-GIF.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="blt71a5bf7dc6e1078d" alt="TraceID-GIF.gif"></p><h2>Java ECS Logging library</h2><p>We have also added a <a href="https://github.com/elastic/java-ecs-logging">Java ECS Logging library</a> as a part of the 7.4 release. With the use of this library, the data logged will be in an <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/ecs-reference.html">ECS-compatible JSON</a> which will allow you to process logs without needing to set up a logstash/ingest node pipeline. In addition, it will allow for automatically logging the field names the Logs app expects, making it easier for you to leverage the log correlation feature available with APM Java agent without the need to do any additional configuration. Once set up, you can easily jump from the Span timeline in Elastic APM to the Logs app, showing only the logs which belong to the corresponding request. Conversely, you can also jump from a log line in the Logs app to the Span Timeline of APM.&nbsp;
</p> <h2>.NET agent full framework support</h2><p>7.4 release brings in out of the box instrumentation for .NET framework. This means that if you have ASP.NET&nbsp;web applications, you will not need to use APIs to create transactions or instrument external calls. Once installed, the agent will be able to auto instrument your application giving you instant visibility into the performance of the application.
</p> <h2>Try it out!</h2><p>You can access the 7.4.0 Elastic APM application on the <a href="/products/elasticsearch/service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud, or you can download it as part of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">default distribution</a> of the Elastic Stack. Grab the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/apm">APM Server</a> (or leverage the one included with an Elasticsearch Service account), instrument your applications with the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html">APM agents</a>, and start monitoring your applications.
</p>

Elastic APM 7.4.0 released

Elastic APM 7.3.0 Released with .NET Agent GA, aggregate service breakdown charts, agent sample rate configuration from the UI, and more.

<p>We are pleased to announce a new release of Elastic APM, version 7.3.0, available on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or as part of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">default distribution</a> of Elastic Stack. This release brings enhancements to the APM App UI, React support for single-page applications (SPA), and the highly anticipated .NET agent.
</p><h2>Elastic APM .NET Agent GA</h2><p>We are super pumped to announce that Elastic APM agent for .NET is now generally available! Thanks to all of you that provided us with valuable feedback on the preview and beta versions of the agent. The .NET Agent adds automatic instrumentation for ASP.NET Core 2.x+ and Entity Framework Core 2.x+, while also providing a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/dotnet/current/public-api.html">Public API</a> for the .NET agent that will allow you to instrument any .NET custom application code. If you haven’t had the chance to check out the new agent, test drive the <a href="https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-dotnet/">agent</a> and let us know what you would like to see <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBjUbv9qjcwNFSXpjJT_PmGJn0kpuF1IdZDtnBl0MLNRbYbQ/viewform?usp=sf_link">added to it</a>.&nbsp;
</p><p><br></p><h2>Aggregate Service Breakdown Charts</h2><p>In addition to the transaction duration and throughput charts, 7.3 release adds aggregated service breakdown charts for services. These charts help you visualize where your application and services are spending most of their time, allowing you to get to the root cause of a performance problem quickly. These charts are available in Beta with support for certain APM agents(Java, Go, Node.js, Python).&nbsp;
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt81f63d0e7ef4d158/5d38643b5cb66453b127a1c2/image3.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt81f63d0e7ef4d158" alt="image3.png">
</p><p><br></p><h2>Agent Sample Rate Configuration from APM UI</h2><p>Configuring sampling rate for your services is&nbsp;a whole lot easier with this release. The new settings page now lets you view and configure the sampling rate for your services from within the APM UI without changing the agent yaml files for each individual reporting instance of the service. Check out our <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/7.3/agent-configuration.html">docs</a>&nbsp;to learn more about this configuration.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt9665b3b2de8a8106/5d38644fc3a6d753ac37b724/image4.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt9665b3b2de8a8106" alt="image4.png">
</p><p><br></p><h2>React support for Single Page Applications&nbsp;</h2><p>7.3 release also brings a lot of exciting changes to the RUM (Real User Monitoring) agent. We have furthered our support Single Page Applications. You can now use the RUM agent to instrument your SPA (Single Page applications) written in React.js without the need to manually create or rename transactions. &nbsp; Check out the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/js-base/current/react-integration.html">docs</a> and instrument your React SPA today!
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt2095fbbc02d32f8a/5d3864f72a506857d64f03ef/image1.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="blt2095fbbc02d32f8a" alt="image1.gif">
</p><p><br></p><h2>APM RUM integration with Elastic Maps</h2><p>We have also made both the geo-ip and user-agent modules enabled by default, making it easier for you to integrate with <a href="https://www.elastic.co/products/maps">Maps</a> so you can better understand the performance of your RUM applications.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt0783d82332ade3b8/5d38653cd5e2de4f5c29cc04/image2.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt0783d82332ade3b8" alt="image2.png">
</p><p><br>
</p><h2>Try it out!</h2><p>You can access the 7.3.0 Elastic APM application on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud, or you can download it as part of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">default distribution</a> of the Elastic Stack. Grab the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/apm">APM Server</a> (or leverage the one included with an Elasticsearch Service account), instrument your applications with the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html">APM agents</a>, and start monitoring your applications.
</p>

Articles by Neha Duggal

Bold, insightful, real-time: Visualizing APM data with Canvas in Kibana

Elastic introduces OpenTelemetry integration

Elastic APM 7.8.0 released

Elastic APM 7.7.0 released with service maps, async profiler, and more

Elastic APM 7.6.0 released

Elastic APM 7.5.0 released

Elastic APM 7.4.0 released

Elastic APM 7.3.0 released

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Articles by Neha Duggal

Bold, insightful, real-time: Visualizing APM data with Canvas in Kibana

Elastic introduces OpenTelemetry integration

Elastic APM 7.8.0 released

Elastic APM 7.7.0 released with service maps, async profiler, and more

Elastic APM 7.6.0 released

Elastic APM 7.5.0 released

Elastic APM 7.4.0 released

Elastic APM 7.3.0 released