The amount of storage for APM data depends on several factors: the number of services you are instrumenting, how much traffic the services see, agent and server settings, and the length of time you store your data.

Reduce the sample rateedit

The transaction sample rate directly influences the number of documents (more precisely, spans) to be indexed. It is the easiest way to reduce storage.

The transaction sample rate is a configuration setting of each agent. Reducing it does not affect the collection of metrics such as Transactions per second.

Reduce collected stack trace informationedit

Elastic APM agents collect stacktrace information under certain circumstances. This can be very helpful in identifying issues in your code, but it also comes with an overhead at collection time and increases the storage usage.

Stack trace collection settings are managed in each agent.

Delete dataedit

You might want to only keep data for a defined time period. This might mean deleting old documents periodically, deleting data collected for specific services or customers, or deleting specific indices.

Depending on your use case, you can delete data periodically with index lifecycle management, Curator, the Delete By Query API, or in the Kibana Index Management UI.

Delete data with ILMedit

Index Lifecycle management (ILM) enables you to automate how you want to manage your indices over time. You can base actions on factors such as shard size and performance requirements. See Index lifecycle management to learn more.

Delete data matching a queryedit

You can delete all APM documents matching a specific query. For example, to delete all documents with a given service.name, use the following request:

POST /.ds-*-apm*/_delete_by_query
{
  "query": {
    "term": {
      "service.name": {
        "value": "old-service-name"
      }
    }
  }
}

Delete data via Kibana Index Management UIedit

Select the indices you want to delete, and click Manage indices to see the available actions. Then click delete indices.

Manage Indices via Kibanaedit

Kibana’s index management allows you to manage your cluster’s indices, data streams, index templates, and much more.

Update existing dataedit

You might want to update documents that are already indexed. For example, if you your service name was set incorrectly.

To do this, you can use the Update By Query API.

Rename a serviceedit

To rename a service, send the following request:

POST /.ds-*-apm*/_update_by_query?expand_wildcards=all
{
  "query": {
    "term": {
      "service.name": {
        "value": "current-service-name"
      }
    }
  },
  "script": {
    "source": "ctx._source.service.name = 'new-service-name'",
    "lang": "painless"
  }
}