Elastic APM 6.6 has arrived, and it's brought metrics, distributed tracing, integration with Logging and Infrastructure, easier agent attachment, and more.

<html><head></head><body><p><a href="/downloads/apm">Elastic APM</a> 6.6 is here, and it&apos;s brought a lot of enhancements. Let&apos;s get right into it...
</p><h2>Metrics</h2><p>Infrastructure and application metrics are important sources of information when debugging production systems. As part of the 6.6 release, the latest APM agents will automatically pick up basic metrics, such as system and process-level CPU and memory metrics. The metrics will be visualized in the new service Metrics tab in the APM UI.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltdd31423ddd350768/5c57d420713ebdec0ba06f27/apm-metrics-view.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="bltdd31423ddd350768" alt="apm-metrics-view.jpg">
</p><figcaption>Metrics is supported by all of our backend agents: <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/java/master/metrics.html">Java</a>, <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/nodejs/master/metrics.html">Node.js</a>, <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/go/master/metrics.html">Go</a>, <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/python/master/metrics.html">Python</a> and <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/ruby/master/metrics.html">Ruby</a>:
</figcaption><p>Using the search bar, you can easily filter down the metrics shown for specific hosts or containers. There are already additional metrics sent by some agents that you can graph using the &#x201C;Visualize&#x201D; tools in Kibana. For example, the Java agent sends <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/java/current/metrics.html#metrics-jvm">JVM metrics</a> and the Go agent sends <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/go/current/metrics.html#metrics-golang">metrics on the Go runtime</a>. Make sure to use the <code>apm-*-metric-*</code> index pattern to graph these.
</p><h2>Distributed tracing is now generally available</h2><p>We shipped support for distributed tracing in beta <a href="/blog/elastic-apm-6-5-0-released">6.5 release</a>. Distributed tracing is becoming a key feature in modern application performance monitoring as application architectures are shifting from monolithic to more distributed and service-based.
</p><p>Distributed tracing allows APM users to automatically trace requests all the way through the service architecture, and visualize those traces in one single view in the APM UI. In the 6.6 release, we&apos;ve polished the UI and are now removing the beta label and marking it as generally available. Distributed tracing is supported by all APM agents, including the <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/js-base/current/index.html">JavaScript RUM agent</a>.
</p><h3>Supporting OpenTracing and Trace Context</h3><p>Elastic APM supports the <a href="https://w3c.github.io/trace-context/">W3C Trace Context</a> working group&apos;s effort to standardize the HTTP header format for distributed tracing. Our agent implementations closely follow the Trace Context draft specification, and we intend to fully support the final specification. Additionally, all agents now have <a href="https://opentracing.io/">OpenTracing</a> compatible bridges.
</p><h2>Integrations with Infrastructure and Logging</h2><p>We recently shipped two new exciting products in early Beta: Logging and Infrastructure. These are dedicated apps for the logging and infrastructure metrics use cases. The logging app enables you to live stream log events and the Infrastructure app provides you with a point in time snapshot of your infrastructure. For more details, check out this <a href="/blog/infrastructure-and-logs-ui-new-ways-for-ops-to-interact-with-elasticsearch">Logs and Infrastructure UI blog post</a>.
</p><p>Having logs, metrics, and APM traces stored and indexed in Elasticsearch is super powerful. For example, a trace might be slow due to issues with the container it was served from, not the code itself. Being able to quickly correlate data sources like infrastructure metrics, logs and traces enables you to debug the root cause much faster.
</p><p>In the APM UI, we&apos;ve just released the first integration between the APM, Logging and Infrastructure apps. When looking at a trace, you can now quickly jump to the host or container metrics and logs by clicking the Actions menu. Here&apos;s a screenshot of the integration points:
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt09cf6359081f8527/5c57d40dbc5d07ed0b48c8ce/apm-action-links.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt09cf6359081f8527" alt="apm-action-links.png">
</p><h2>Java agent updates</h2><p>The Java agent has released two great new features: wildcard tracing and easier agent attachment.
</p><h3>Wildcard method tracing</h3><p>The Java agent doesn&apos;t automatically trace methods. You can manually annotate methods in the source code to have them instrumented, but now we&apos;re adding a new way of tracing methods.
</p><p><code>trace_methods</code> takes a list of methods to automatically instrument. The syntax is <code>modifier fully.qualified.class.Name#methodName(fully.qualified.parameter.Type)</code>. You can use wildcards for the class name, the method name and the parameter types. The <code>*</code> wildcard matches zero or more characters. Specifying the parameter types is optional. The modifier can be omitted or one of public, protected, private or *.
</p><p>A few examples:
</p><ul>
	<li><code>org.example.MyClass#myMethod</code></li>
	<li><code>org.example.MyClass#myMethod()</code></li>
	<li><code>org.example.MyClass#myMethod(java.lang.String)</code></li>
	<li><code>org.example.MyClass#myMe*od(java.lang.String, int)</code></li>
	<li><code>private org.example.MyClass#myMe*od(java.lang.String, *)</code></li>
	<li><code>* org.example.MyClas*#myMe*od(*.String, int[])</code></li>
	<li><code>public org.example.services.*Service#*</code></li>
</ul><p>We&apos;re planning to post an in-depth blog post on method level tracing with Java in the near future. Until then, check out the <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/java/master/config-core.html#config-trace-methods">trace_methods documentation</a>.
</p><h3>Easier agent attachment</h3><p>This experimental installation method does not require you to alter the configuration of your application server and can be used to conveniently instrument all JVMs on a particular host. This works by running a small background program which attaches the Elastic APM Java agent to a specific JVM or to all running and starting JVMs. This means there is a lot less you have to configure and you don&apos;t have to touch the configuration files of your application server at all.
</p><p>For more details, check out the <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/java/master/setup-attach-cli.html">automatic agent attacher documentation</a>.
</p><h2>Try out APM on Elasticsearch Service</h2>We are also excited to announce that Elastic APM is now supported on <a href="/blog/introducing-elastic-apm-on-elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> and <a href="/blog/elastic-cloud-enterprise-2-1-0-released">Elastic Cloud Enterprise</a>, bringing you more options on how deploy and manage APM Server. Be sure to try out all the new features for Elastic APM by trying it out on our Elasticsearch Service. Start now with a <a href="/cloud/elasticsearch-service/signup">14-day Elasticsearch Service trial</a> and a free 512 MB APM Server as part of every deployment.</body></html>

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Elastic APM 6.6.0 Released

Elastic APM 6.5.0 has been released! Learn about our new distributed tracing, monitoring, and more.

<html><head></head><body><p>This is a milestone release for us. Elastic APM now fully supports Java and Go! Additionally, this release includes support for Distributed Tracing in Beta. Finally, we&apos;ve optimized our intake protocol and shipped support for monitoring of the APM Server. <a href="/downloads/apm">Download Elastic APM 6.5.0</a> to take advantage of these new features.
</p><h2>Java and Go support</h2><p>Many of you have asked for it, and it&apos;s finally here: Elastic APM now supports Java and Go!
</p><p>The Java agent supports Java versions 7 through 11, has built-in support for popular frameworks like Servlet API, Spring Web MVC/Spring Boot, and JAX-RS, supports application servers, like Tomcat and Wildfly, and JDBC database queries. For supported technologies, the agent will automatically instrument incoming HTTP requests to your application. The agent also has a public API for custom instrumentation.
</p><p>Getting started is as easy as adding the agent as a <code>-javaagent</code> when starting your application. For more details, see our <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/java/current/index.html">Java agent documentation</a>.
</p><p>For Go, we provide an API and various built-in modules for instrumenting your application. To get started, fetch the agent with <code>go get go.elastic.co/apm</code> and instrument your application using middleware provided by <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/go/current/instrumenting-source.html#builtin-modules-apmhttp">module/apmhttp</a>, or one of the other framework-specific modules.
</p><p>See the <a href="/guide/en/apm/agent/go/current/supported-tech.html">supported technologies</a> documentation for a list of what instrumentation we support out-of-the-box. Custom instrumentation is supported via the agent&apos;s API.
</p><h2>Distributed tracing </h2><p>A key feature of modern application performance monitoring is distributed tracing. As software application architecture shifts from a monolithic architecture to a more distributed, service-based architecture, it&apos;s critical to have the ability to trace how requests flow through the system.
</p><p>With distributed tracing, request transactions are linked together into a trace, which includes the end to end performance of how a request was served, and which services were part of it.
</p><p>Distributed tracing enables developers and operations to contextualize the performance of individual transactions and thereby quickly pinpoint bottlenecks of the end-user experience.
</p><p>Below is a screenshot of the new distributed tracing feature in Elastic APM. This feature is currently in beta.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt9bb670a226281921/5c304cd8597189c90b024228/distributed_tracing.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt9bb670a226281921" alt="" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><h3>Getting started</h3><p>All of our APM agents have been updated to support distributed tracing out of the box. This means that our agents will automatically look for a trace id in the HTTP header of incoming requests, and propagate that id to child services. If there is no trace id, the agent will generate a unique id and pass that on.
</p><p>To get started, simply update the Elastic stack and APM Server to version 6.5, then update your APM agents to the latest version.
</p><h3>Standards</h3><p>Elastic APM supports <a href="https://opentracing.io/">OpenTracing</a> and has built-in OpenTracing compatible bridges in the Java and Go agents. The remaining agents will also have OpenTracing bridges built-in once we launch distributed tracing as generally available.
</p><p>Elastic APM supports the <a href="https://w3c.github.io/trace-context/">W3C Trace Context</a> working group&apos;s effort to standardize the HTTP header format for distributed tracing. Our agent implementations closely follow the Trace Context draft specification, and we intend to fully support the final specification.
</p><h2>Improved memory footprint</h2><p>With our new NDJSON-based protocol, agents can open an HTTP POST request to the APM Server and use chunked encoding to stream events to the APM Server as soon as they are recorded in the agent. This decreases the memory footprint in the agents as they can send the data almost as soon as it&#x2019;s recorded. Similarly, memory usage on the APM Server is greatly reduced as it can decompress and parse events one by one as they arrive instead of in big chunks. If you want to learn more about the new intake protocol, check out our <a href="/blog/increasing-memory-efficiency-with-an-improved-elastic-apm-internal-intake-protocol">Increasing Memory Efficiency with an Improved Elastic APM Internal Intake Protocol</a>&#xA0;blog post.&#xA0;
</p><h2>Monitoring</h2><p>The APM Server now supports monitoring. In the monitoring app, you&apos;ll now see a dedicated APM Server tab for monitoring APM Server throughput and errors. This will help tuning of agent configurations, particularly sampling rates, and ensuring APM data is flowing smoothly through to the system.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt500548cb28c47d7e/5c304cd425a401fc6fe4f4a1/apm_monitoring.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt500548cb28c47d7e" alt="" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><h2>Future</h2><p>We&apos;re excited to have shipped all of the goodies of the 6.5 release, but the work doesn&apos;t stop here. We&apos;re continuously improving the APM product. If you have any feedback or questions, please reach out on our <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co/c/apm">Discuss</a> forum. &#xA0;
</p></body></html>

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Elastic APM 6.5.0 Released

Elastic APM (Application Performance Monitoring) 6.4 fully leverages the power of search in Elasticsearch.

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Elastic APM 6.4.0 Released: The Search Edition

We're excited to announce that Elastic APM is generally available as part of the 6.2 release of the Elastic Stack!

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Elastic APM GA released

We're excited to share that Elastic APM is now in beta!

<html><head></head><body><table style="background: #FFFFD2;">
<tbody>
<tr>
	<td><strong>Still running a beta?</strong> <a href="https://www.elastic.co/solutions/apm">Elastic APM</a> is generally available (as of February&#xA0;6, 2018) and ready for production deployment.
	</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table><p>We&apos;re excited to share that Elastic APM is now in beta!
</p><p>In 6.0, we released the alpha, which included the open source APM Server and agents. With this release, we&apos;re now also providing you with a dedicated Kibana UI to easily visualize and debug performance bottlenecks and errors in your code.
</p><p>We want to help developers spend less time in the develop-test-deploy loop, and be able to ship code changes with confidence. To accomplish that, we&apos;ve designed an UI that is designed specifically for the developers that wrote the code. The UI is available for free via X-Pack with a Basic license, and you get it out of the box with the 6.1 release.
</p><p>Here&apos;s a preview of the UI in action:
</p><p><img src="https://api.contentstack.io/v2/uploads/5a2fae48abc72223324935dc/download?uid=blt7d110210b6f7c808" data-sys-asset-uid="blt7d110210b6f7c808" alt="APM App with Kibana">
</p><h3>Zero UI configuration</h3><p>Once you install the Elastic APM agent library in your application, the application will automatically appear in the UI. Installing agents is as easy as installing the Elastic APM agent for your programming language and copy/pasting a few lines of configuration. The agent will automatically instrument your application and send performance data through to the APM Server. The APM Server will process and index the data into Elasticsearch.
</p><h3>Visualize application bottlenecks</h3><p>APM monitors transactions and errors in your application. A transaction can be a request to your server or a batch job or a custom transaction type. Out of the box, you&apos;ll get response times, requests per minute, status codes per endpoint, plus the ability to dive into a specific request sample and get a complete waterfall view of what your application is spending its time on - like database queries, cache calls, external requests, etc. This lets you easily compare and debug fast responses to slow responses.
</p><p><img src="https://api.contentstack.io/v2/uploads/5a2fae37abc72223324935d6/download?uid=blt2229242ac68a4e6b" data-sys-asset-uid="blt2229242ac68a4e6b" alt="Transaction Sample">
</p><p>For each incoming request and each application error you also get access to contextual information, like request header, user information, system values or custom data that you can manually attach to the request.
</p><p>Having access to application-level insights with just a few clicks will drastically decrease spent on debugging 500s, slow response times and crashes.
</p><h3>Correlate APM with other data sources using dashboards</h3><p>If you&apos;re already using the Elastic Stack for logging and server-level metrics, you can easily import the prepacked APM dashboards that comes with the APM Server. This will enable you to easily grab APM specific visualizations and use those to correlate APM data with other data sources.
</p><p>To get the dashboards, run the following command in the APM Server 6.1 directory <code>./apm-server setup</code>
</p><h3>Get started today</h3><p>The UI is now available as part of Kibana and activated via X-Pack with a Basic license. It&apos;s free - and you can <a href="/solutions/apm">get it right here</a>.
</p><p>If you have questions or feedback, please drop us a note in the <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co/c/apm">forum</a>.
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Elastic APM enters Beta with new UI

Today, we’re really excited to take our first big step in adding APM to the Elastic Stack!

<html><head></head><body><table style="background: #FFFFD2;">
<tbody>
<tr>
	<td><a href="https://www.elastic.co/solutions/apm">Elastic APM</a> is generally available (as of February 6, 2018) and ready for production deployment.
	</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><em>Rasmus is product manager for APM and was the co-founder of Opbeat.</em>
</p>
<p>A few months ago, <a href="http://www.elastic.co/blog/welcome-opbeat-to-the-elastic-family">Opbeat joined forces with Elastic</a>, and today we&#x2019;re really excited to take our first big step in adding APM to the Elastic Stack!
</p>
<p>Adding APM (Application Performance Monitoring) to the Elastic Stack is a natural next step in providing our users with end-to-end monitoring, from logging, to server-level metrics, to application-level metrics, all the way to the end-user experience in the browser or client.
</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 11px;"><img src="https://api.contentstack.io/v2/uploads/5994b75b19885a05091a73b7/download?uid=bltc27d46ed2bd1312a" data-sys-asset-uid="bltc27d46ed2bd1312a" alt="29385280-f75f134e-828b-11e7-927a-2dd457b70a34.png" "="">Screenshot of Kibana dashboard showing application response times and requests per minute.<br></span>
</p>
<p>Elastic APM consists of three components - the agents, the server, and the UI:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>The agents are libraries in your application that run inside of your application process. Agents automatically instrument your application in order to measure the duration of requests to your service. It also automatically measures things like database queries, cache calls, external http requests. Errors that happen inside your application are also automatically collected.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
	<li>The server processes data from agents and stores the application data in Elasticsearch. The server is written in Golang.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
	<li>The UI (in the alpha version) is pre-built, customizable Kibana Dashboards that gives you an instant overview of application response times, requests per minutes, error occurrences and more.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<p>Today, we&#x2019;ve&#xA0;open-sourced the <a href="https://github.com/elastic/apm-server">server</a> along with agents for <a href="https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-nodejs">Node.js</a> and <a href="https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-python">Python</a>!
</p>
<h2>Early testers welcome
</h2>
<p>This is a pre-alpha release, and we welcome you to take it for an early spin. You can get started by following the README in the <a href="https://github.com/elastic/apm-server">APM Server</a>&#xA0;repo.
</p>
<p>We&#x2019;d love to get feedback as we work our way towards the alpha and beta releases, and you&#x2019;re welcome to <a href="https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/issues/new">submit issues</a> and join the discussion on <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co/c/apm">our forum</a>.
</p>
<p>If you&#x2019;d like to see us add support for your stack, please take a minute and <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-dgFhNKBBeeYHXZc8MIgRs1w0qNLx-h7WaHtovz46_o/">fill out this form</a>.
</p>
<h2>Dedicated APM UI is next
</h2>
<p>Later this year we&#x2019;ll give the UI a massive upgrade when we release a dedicated APM UI, similar to the intuitive and easy-to-use interface that is known from Opbeat today. The UI will be delivered as a Kibana plugin and will be included in the Beta release. Stay tuned!
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
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Starting Down the Path of APM for the Elastic Stack

I am very excited to announce that Elastic is joining forces with Opbeat, an application performance monitoring (APM) company.

<table style="background: #FFFFD2;">
<tbody>
<tr>
	<td><a href="https://www.elastic.co/solutions/apm">Elastic APM</a> is generally available (as of February 6, 2018) and ready for production deployment.
	</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table><p><em>A note from Shay Banon</em>
</p><p>I am very excited to announce that Elastic is joining forces with Opbeat, an application performance monitoring (APM) company.
</p><p>I’ve been personally interested in the APM space for some time now. Since the early days of Elasticsearch, I have believed that powerful search is fundamental to solving all kinds of complex data problems. Our users (<a href="/elasticon/conf/2017/sf/building-a-near-real-time-pipeline-for-all-things-blizzard">Blizzard</a>, <a href="/elasticon/conf/2016/sf/how-the-elastic-stack-changed-goldman-sachs">Goldman Sachs</a>, <a href="/webinars/speed-scale-and-security">NetSuite</a>, and <a href="/use-cases/sprint">Sprint</a> to name a few) have validated that core belief in the IT operations space by using Elastic products to gain real-time insights from infrastructure logs and metrics, at a petabyte scale. Application performance data is the natural next step in the journey, and joining forces with Opbeat will allow us to accelerate innovation in the APM space for our users.
</p><p>Opbeat has built a highly curated application-level monitoring experience, focusing on the JavaScript ecosystem, i.e. Node.js on the backend and AngularJS / React on the front end. By helping developers monitor the end-to-end performance impact of changes to their application code, Opbeat enables them to find and fix issues faster. Integrating metrics from Opbeat agents with the flexible data store of Elasticsearch and the visualization power of Kibana, will bring APM to a whole new level. The future Elastic APM solution will let developers analyze their infrastructure logs and metrics, alongside application performance data in a single dashboard. &nbsp;
</p><p>I’d like to welcome the entire Opbeat team and community to the Elastic family. I’m thrilled that Opbeat founders, Rasmus Makwarth and Ron Cohen, and team are joining us to build a turnkey APM solution, that extends the open source <a href="/products">Elastic Stack</a> into new territories.
</p><p>Now to Rasmus and Ron for their thoughts.
</p><p><em>A note from Rasmus Makwarth & Ron Cohen</em>
</p><p>At Opbeat, we set out to build a next-generation APM solution that was truly designed for developers. Modern organizations are increasingly adopting a DevOps culture, requiring developers to monitor their own code in production. This shift requires modern APM tools to provide instant and actionable insights to developers. Opbeat provides a highly curated UI and deep code integration that maps production application issues to the developer source code.
</p><figure>
&nbsp;<img src="https://api.contentstack.io/v2/uploads/594a74f24a09199f0c5b95ca/download?uid=blt0b57f053d7d3acae" data-sys-asset-uid="blt0b57f053d7d3acae" alt="opbeat-graphic.jpg">
&nbsp; <figcaption>The Opbeat UI showing which component is slowing down the application, including the source code and authors.</figcaption>
</figure><p>Over the past six months, we’ve been fortunate to get to know the people at Elastic, and are amazed by the team, the business, and the vision. And, equally important, Opbeat and Elastic were culturally a natural match from the very first day. We’ve been happy users of the Elastic Stack for monitoring our infrastructure metrics and logs, and are excited about being a part of the team that extends the Elastic Stack to application-level metrics. We think that APM is a perfect extension of the Elastic Stack. Proactive tracking with X-Pack alerting features, pre-built Kibana dashboards, longer data retention, smarter alerts with anomaly detection and machine learning - the integration possibilities are endless.
</p><p>As for the current <a href="https://opbeat.com/">Opbeat.com</a> service, nothing changes for now. We’re committed to operating the service until we launch the Elastic APM product. When that time comes, we’ll help existing Opbeat customers migrate.
</p><p>We’re thrilled to be working with such a great team, and being a part of Elastic will enable us to accelerate our path to building the best APM product.
</p><p>The road ahead is exciting.
</p>

Articles by Rasmus Makwarth