APM Articles
6x faster at 500 services: how we rebuilt the Kibana APM service map from canvas to React DOM
Each service node shows alert, SLO and anomaly health so you can filter to breaching services only and embed the result on any Kibana dashboard, with full keyboard navigation across the topology.
Your SLO is on fire; here's how to find the arsonist in Elastic Observability
When SLO alerting flags a burn rate spike, follow the SLI from the alert detail page through bad event spans and trace waterfalls to find the exact dependency burning your SLO error budget, all without leaving the investigation.
Four clicks from alert to root cause: how Elastic Observability links APM services to Kubernetes infrastructure
Check service dependencies and compare per-pod CPU, memory and network trends on the Infrastructure tab to find which instance is causing trouble, all without leaving the alert investigation.
Three clicks from alert to error log: breaking down RED metrics by any span attribute in Elastic Observability
See which pod, deployment or version is driving a RED metrics change by breaking down span attributes in Discover, then trace a failing span to the error log behind it.
From alert to failing dependency in four clicks: Elastic APM's embedded service map
The APM service map is now embedded on alert pages with filters, connection metrics and a service fly-out so you can analyse dependencies and find the root cause without leaving the alert.
How Elastic cut OpenTelemetry tail sampling memory by 65% with disk-backed trace storage
Elastic contributed two features upstream to the OTel Collector's tail sampling processor. The span-ingest strategy lets sampling decisions happen earlier, and Pebble tail storage moves trace buffering to disk. It costs more CPU, but operators can raise decision_wait and num_traces without OOM kills.
From five dashboards to one prompt: how we built an APM health monitor with Elastic Agent Builder
Five ES|QL tools score latency, errors, throughput and dependencies to find the root cause, so you don't dashboard-hop during an APM incident.
3 signals, 2 env vars, 0 collectors: OpenTelemetry with Python and Elastic's Managed OTLP Endpoint
Instrument a Flask API with OpenTelemetry and ship traces, metrics, and logs to Elastic Cloud using just 2 environment variables, no collector needed.
Contextual AI: Stop pinging the SRE: three MCP tools that turn Elastic Agent Builder into your team's runbook
Build three MCP tools in Elastic Agent Builder that read endpoint health, recent deploys and SLO burn rate directly in your editor. Encode your platform team's runbook once; every developer gets self-serve production context without pinging an SRE.
How to trace MCP server tool calls with OpenTelemetry and Elastic APM
Add OpenTelemetry tracing to an MCP server, visualize tool call performance in Elastic APM, and query the trace data from Claude Desktop using the Agent Builder MCP.
Connecting Cursor to Production Logs via the Elastic MCP Server
Learn how to connect Cursor to your Elastic APM data using the Elastic Agent Builder MCP server, so you can debug production errors and make UI decisions backed by real usage data without leaving your editor.
OpenTelemetry browser instrumentation using EDOT Browser & Kibana
A step-by-step guide on OpenTelemetry browser instrumentation. Learn how to add EDOT Browser to a web app, export browser telemetry via OTLP, and verify traces, spans, and service maps in Kibana.