APM agent configuration allows you to fine-tune your APM agents from within the APM app. Changes are automatically propagated to your APM agents, so there’s no need to redeploy your applications.

To learn more about this feature, see APM agent configuration.

Here’s a sample configuration:

apm-server.agent.config.cache.expiration: 45s
apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch.api_key: TiNAGG4BaaMdaH1tRfuU:KnR6yE41RrSowb0kQ0HWoA

APM agent configuration optionsedit

The following options are only supported for APM Server binary users. You can specify these options in the apm-server.agent.config section of the apm-server.yml config file:

apm-server.agent.config.cache.expirationedit

When using APM agent configuration, information fetched from Elasticsearch will be cached in memory for some time. Specify the cache expiration time via this setting. Defaults to 30s (30 seconds).

apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearchedit

Takes the same options as output.elasticsearch.

For APM Server binary users and Elastic Agent standalone-managed APM Server, APM agent configuration is automatically fetched from Elasticsearch using the output.elasticsearch configuration. If output.elasticsearch isn’t set or doesn’t have sufficient privileges, use these authentication configuration variables provide Elasticsearch access.

apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch.usernameedit

The basic authentication username for connecting to Elasticsearch.

apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch.passwordedit

The basic authentication password for connecting to Elasticsearch.

apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch.api_keyedit

Authentication with an API key. Formatted as id:api_key

Common problemsedit

You may see either of the following HTTP 403 errors from APM Server when it attempts to fetch APM agent configuration:

APM agent log:

"Your Elasticsearch configuration does not support agent config queries. Check your configurations at `output.elasticsearch` or `apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch`."

APM Server log:

rejecting fetch request: no valid elasticsearch config

This occurs because the user or API key set in either apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch or output.elasticsearch (if apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch is not set) does not have adequate permissions to read source maps from Elasticsearch.

To fix this error, add the following index-level privileges to the API key: