Monitoring APM Serveredit

X-Pack monitoring for APM Server requires Elasticsearch 6.5 or later.

X-Pack monitoring enables you to easily monitor APM Server from Kibana. For more information, see Monitoring the Elastic Stack and Beats Monitoring Metrics.

To configure APM Server to collect and send monitoring metrics:

  1. Create a user that has appropriate authority to send system-level monitoring data to Elasticsearch. For example, you can use the built-in apm_system user or assign the built-in apm_system role to another user. For more information, see Setting Up User Authentication and Built-in Roles.
  2. Add the xpack.monitoring settings in the APM Server configuration file. If you configured Elasticsearch output, specify the following minimal configuration:

    xpack.monitoring.enabled: true

    If you configured a different output, such as Logstash, you must specify additional configuration options. For example:

    xpack.monitoring:
      enabled: true
      elasticsearch:
        hosts: ["https://example.com:9200", "https://example2.com:9200"]
        username: apm_system
        password: somepassword

    Currently you must send monitoring data to the same cluster as all other events. If you configured Elasticsearch output, do not specify additional hosts in the monitoring configuration.

  3. Configure monitoring in Kibana.
  4. To verify your monitoring configuration, point your web browser at your Kibana host, and select Monitoring from the side navigation. Metrics reported from APM Server should be visible in the Beats section. When X-Pack security is enabled, to view the monitoring dashboards you must log in to Kibana as a user who has the kibana_user and monitoring_user roles.