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Switch to the Elastic APM integrationedit

The APM integration offers a number of benefits over the standalone method of running APM Server:

Fleet:

  • A single, unified way to add monitoring for logs, metrics, traces, and other types of data to each host — install one thing instead of multiple
  • Central, unified configuration management — no need to edit multiple configuration files

Data streams:

  • Reduced number of fields per index, better space efficiency, and faster queries
  • More granular data control
  • Errors and metrics data streams are shared with other data sources — which means better long-term integration with the logs and metrics apps
  • Removes template inheritance for ILM policies and makes use of new Elasticsearch index and component templates
  • Fixes resource 'apm-8.9.0-$type' exists, but it is not an alias error

APM Integration:

  • Easier to install APM on edge machines
  • Improved source map handling and APM agent configuration management
  • Less configuration
  • Easier and less error-prone upgrade path
  • Zero-downtime configuration changes

APM integration architectureedit

Elastic APM consists of four components: APM agents, the Elastic APM integration, Elasticsearch, and Kibana. Generally, there are two ways that these four components can work together:

APM agents on edge machines send data to a centrally hosted APM integration:

Or, APM agents and the APM integration live on edge machines and enroll via a centrally hosted Elastic Agent: