Supported environmentsedit

The attachment is supported on Windows, Unix and Solaris operating systems on HotSpot-based JVMs (like OpenJDK and Oracle JDK) and OpenJ9.

Some flags, like --include and --exclude require the jps command to be installed, which is part of the JDK distribution and does not typically come with the JRE distribution.

Caveatsedit

The approach to mitigate NoClassDefFoundError s when used in OSGi containers (which includes most application servers) is experimental. Versions prior to 1.18.0 don’t support OSGi containers.

There can only be one agent instance with one configuration per JVM. So if you deploy multiple web applications to the same application server and call ElasticApmAttacher.attach() in each application, the first attach() wins and the second one will be ignored. That also means that if you are configuring the agent with elasticapm.properties, the application which attaches first gets to decide the configuration. See the default value description of the service_name configuration option for ways to have different `service.name`s for each deployment.

Usageedit

Declare a dependency to the apm-agent-attach artifact.

pom.xml.

<dependency>
    <groupId>co.elastic.apm</groupId>
    <artifactId>apm-agent-attach</artifactId>
    <version>${elastic-apm.version}</version>
</dependency>

Call ElasticApmAttacher.attach() in the first line of your public static void main(String[] args) method.

This example demonstrates the the usage of the attach API with a simple Spring Boot application:

MyApplication.java.

import co.elastic.apm.attach.ElasticApmAttacher;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;

@SpringBootApplication
public class MyApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        ElasticApmAttacher.attach();
        SpringApplication.run(MyApplication.class, args);
    }
}

Configurationedit

The recommended way of configuring the agent when using the attach API is to add the configuration to src/main/resources/elasticapm.properties.