Get started with the APM appedit

Elastic APM captures different types of information from within instrumented applications:

  • Spans contain information about the execution of a specific code path. They measure from the start to end of an activity, and they can have a parent/child relationship with other spans.
  • Transactions are a special kind of span; they are the first span for a particular service and have extra metadata associated with them. As an example, a transaction could be a request to your server, a batch job, or a custom transaction type. Traces link together related transactions to show an end-to-end performance of how a request was served and which services were part of it.
  • Errors contain information about the original exception that occurred or about a log created when the exception occurred.

Curated charts and tables display the different types of APM data, which allows you to compare and debug your applications easily.

Want to learn more about the Elastic APM ecosystem? See the APM Overview.