You can configure APM Server to use an ingest node to pre-process documents before indexing them in Elasticsearch.

A pipeline is a definition of a series of processors that operate on your data. For example, a pipeline can define one processor to remove a field, and another to rename a field.

Default ingest pipelineedit

By default, register.ingest.pipeline.enabled is set to true. This loads the default pipeline definition to Elasticsearch on APM Server startup.

The default pipeline is apm. It adds user agent information to events and processes Geo-IP data, which is especially useful for Elastic’s JavaScript RUM Agent. You can view the pipeline configuration by navigating to the APM Server’s home directory and then viewing ingest/pipeline/definition.json.

To disable this, or any other pipeline, set output.elasticsearch.pipeline: _none.

Custom pipelinesedit

Using custom pipelines involves two steps:

Register pipelines in Elasticsearchedit

To register a pipeline in Elasticsearch, you can either configure APM Server to register pipelines on startup, or you can manually upload a pipeline definition.

Register pipelines on APM Server startupedit

Automatic pipeline registration requires output.elasticsearch to be enabled and configured.

Navigate to APM Server’s home directory and find the default pipeline configuration at ingest/pipeline/definition.json. To add, change, or remove pipelines in Elasticsearch, change the definitions in this file and restart your APM Server or run apm-server setup --pipelines.

By default, pipeline registration is enabled.

Manually upload pipeline definitionsedit

You can manually upload pipeline definitions by describing them in a file. Consider the following sample pipeline in a file named pipeline.json. This pipeline definition converts the value of beat.name to lowercase before indexing each document.

{
    "description": "Test pipeline",
    "processors": [
        {
            "lowercase": {
                "field": "beat.name"
            }
        }
    ]
}

To register this pipeline, run:

curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/_ingest/pipeline/test-pipeline' -d @pipeline.json

Apply pipelines during data ingestionedit

To specify which pipelines to apply during data ingestion, add the pipeline IDs to the pipelines option under output.elasticsearch in the apm-server.yml file:

output.elasticsearch:
  pipelines:
  - pipeline: "test-pipeline"