Product release

Elastic APM enters Beta with new UI

Still running a beta? Elastic APM is generally available (as of February 6, 2018) and ready for production deployment.

We're excited to share that Elastic APM is now in beta!

In 6.0, we released the alpha, which included the open source APM Server and agents. With this release, we're now also providing you with a dedicated Kibana UI to easily visualize and debug performance bottlenecks and errors in your code.

We want to help developers spend less time in the develop-test-deploy loop, and be able to ship code changes with confidence. To accomplish that, we've designed an UI that is designed specifically for the developers that wrote the code. The UI is available for free via X-Pack with a Basic license, and you get it out of the box with the 6.1 release.

Here's a preview of the UI in action:

APM App with Kibana

Zero UI configuration

Once you install the Elastic APM agent library in your application, the application will automatically appear in the UI. Installing agents is as easy as installing the Elastic APM agent for your programming language and copy/pasting a few lines of configuration. The agent will automatically instrument your application and send performance data through to the APM Server. The APM Server will process and index the data into Elasticsearch.

Visualize application bottlenecks

APM monitors transactions and errors in your application. A transaction can be a request to your server or a batch job or a custom transaction type. Out of the box, you'll get response times, requests per minute, status codes per endpoint, plus the ability to dive into a specific request sample and get a complete waterfall view of what your application is spending its time on - like database queries, cache calls, external requests, etc. This lets you easily compare and debug fast responses to slow responses.

Transaction Sample

For each incoming request and each application error you also get access to contextual information, like request header, user information, system values or custom data that you can manually attach to the request.

Having access to application-level insights with just a few clicks will drastically decrease spent on debugging 500s, slow response times and crashes.

Correlate APM with other data sources using dashboards

If you're already using the Elastic Stack for logging and server-level metrics, you can easily import the prepacked APM dashboards that comes with the APM Server. This will enable you to easily grab APM specific visualizations and use those to correlate APM data with other data sources.

To get the dashboards, run the following command in the APM Server 6.1 directory ./apm-server setup

Get started today

The UI is now available as part of Kibana and activated via X-Pack with a Basic license. It's free - and you can get it right here.

If you have questions or feedback, please drop us a note in the forum.