Quickstart: Monitor your application performance
Stack Serverless
In this quickstart guide, you’ll learn how to instrument your application using the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) SDKs. You’ll also learn how to use Observability features to gain deeper insight into your application telemetry data after collecting it.
- An Elasticsearch cluster for storing and searching your data, and Kibana for visualizing and managing your data. This quickstart is available for all Elastic deployment models. The quickest way to get started with this quickstart is using a trial project on Elastic serverless.
- A user with the Admin role or higher—required to onboard system logs and metrics. To learn more, refer to User roles and privileges.
- An Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) Collector or the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector running on the host.
- An Observability project. To learn more, refer to Create an Observability project.
- A user with the Admin role or higher—required to onboard system logs and metrics. To learn more, refer to Assign user roles and privileges.
- An Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) Collector or the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector running on the host.
The EDOT Collector in Agent mode collects infrastructure and application telemetry data sent by the EDOT SDKs and forwards it to Elastic.
Refer to the EDOT Quickstarts to install the EDOT Collector for your deployment mode.
Follow these steps to collect application telemetry data using the EDOT SDKs:
In Kibana, go to the Observability UI and click Add Data.
Under What do you want to monitor? select Application, and then select OpenTelemetry.
Follow the instructions to install the EDOT SDK for your application:
Configure your EDOT SDK to send data to the APM endpoint. The OpenTelemetry tab provides the required configuration values.
If your application runs on Kubernetes, the OpenTelemetry operator automatically instruments your application, provided you've added language-specific annotations. Refer to Auto-instrument applications.
Create a new Elastic Observability Serverless project, or open an existing one.
Under What do you want to monitor? select Application, and then select OpenTelemetry.
Follow the instructions to install the EDOT SDK for your application:
Configure your EDOT SDK to send data to the Managed OTLP endpoint. The OpenTelemetry tab provides the required configuration values.
If your application runs on Kubernetes, the OpenTelemetry operator automatically instruments your application, provided you've added language-specific annotations. Refer to Auto-instrument applications.
After using the Applications page and Discover to confirm you’ve ingested all the application traces, metrics, and logs you want to monitor, use Elastic Observability to gain deeper insight into your application data with the following capabilities and features:
In the Applications UI, analyze and compare data collected from your application. You can also:
- Drill down into data to view details about specific transactions and spans.
- Find transaction latency and failure correlations to identify root causes.
- Create alerts that notify you when an anomaly is detected or a metric exceeds a given value.
In Service Map, explore how your services are connected and check health indicators. You can also:
Use machine learning to quickly pinpoint anomalous transactions and see the health of any upstream and downstream services.
Refer to the Elastic Observability for a description of other useful features.