APM agent TLS communicationedit
TLS is disabled by default. When TLS is enabled for APM Server inbound communication, agents will verify the identity of the APM Server by authenticating its certificate.
Enable TLS in the APM integration configuration panel; a certificate and corresponding private key are required. The certificate and private key can either be issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA) or be self-signed.
Use a self-signed certificateedit
Step 1: Create a self-signed certificateedit
The Elasticsearch distribution offers the certutil tool for the creation of self-signed certificates:
-
Create a CA:
./bin/elasticsearch-certutil ca --pem. You’ll be prompted to enter the desired location of the output zip archive containing the certificate and the private key. - Extract the contents of the CA archive.
-
Create the self-signed certificate:
./bin/elasticsearch-certutil cert --ca-cert <path-to-ca-crt>/ca.crt --ca-key <path-to-ca-key>/ca.key --pem --name localhost - Extract the certificate and key from the resulted zip archive.
Step 2: Configure the APM integrationedit
Configure the APM integration to point to the extracted certificate and key.
Step 3: Configure APM agentsedit
When the APM server uses a certificate that is not chained to a publicly-trusted certificate (e.g. self-signed), additional configuration is required in the APM agent:
-
Go agent: certificate pinning through
ELASTIC_APM_SERVER_CERT -
Python agent: certificate pinning through
server_cert -
Ruby agent: certificate pinning through
server_ca_cert -
.NET agent:
ServerCert -
NodeJS agent: custom CA setting through
serverCaCertFile -
Java agent: adding the certificate to the JVM
trustStore. See APM Server authentication for more details.
We do not recommend disabling APM agent verification of the server’s certificate, but it is possible:
-
Go agent:
ELASTIC_APM_VERIFY_SERVER_CERT -
.NET agent:
VerifyServerCert -
Java agent:
verify_server_cert -
PHP agent:
verify_server_cert -
Python agent:
verify_server_cert -
Ruby agent:
verify_server_cert -
NodeJS agent:
verifyServerCert
Client certificate authenticationedit
APM Server does not require agents to provide a certificate for authentication, and there is no dedicated support for SSL/TLS client certificate authentication in Elastic’s backend agents.