Elastic APM — Complete Application Performance Monitoring Guide

In this tutorial, you will learn about Elastic APM. We cover key concepts, practical examples, and best practices to help you master this topic.

Elastic APM (Application Performance Monitoring) is an application performance monitoring system built on the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). It provides real-time performance insights, distributed tracing, and error tracking.

What You'll Learn

You'll learn how to set up Elastic APM, instrument your API, and use Kibana APM features.

Why It Matters

Elastic APM integrates traces, logs, and metrics in a single platform. It provides service maps, Transaction breakdowns, and error grouping out of the box.

Real-World Use

A team uses Elastic APM to monitor their Node.js API. The APM dashboard shows: throughput (200 req/s), transaction duration (p95: 500ms), error rate (0.5%), and a service map showing dependencies.

Implementation

import elasticapm
from elasticapm.contrib.flask import ElasticAPM

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config["ELASTIC_APM"] = {
    "SERVER_URL": "http://apm-server:8200",
    "SERVICE_NAME": "my-api",
    "ENVIRONMENT": "production",
    "TRANSACTION_SAMPLE_RATE": 0.1,
    "CAPTURE_BODY": "errors",
    "CAPTURE_HEADERS": True,
    "TRANSACTION_MAX_SPANS": 500
}

apm = ElasticAPM(app)

@app.route("/api/checkout")
def checkout():
    with apm.capture_span("validate_cart"):
        validate_cart()
    with apm.capture_span("process_payment"):
        process_payment()
    return jsonify({"status": "success"})

Common Mistakes

| Mistake | Fix | |---------|-----| | 100% sampling rate | High overhead in production | Sample 1-10% of transactions | | No span filtering | Too many spans per transaction | Set max spans per transaction | | Missing service version | Cannot correlate with deployments | Set service_version in configuration | | No custom context | Hard to debug transactions | Add user_id, order_id to transaction context | | Not using service maps | Cannot see service dependencies | Enable service_map and add external calls |

What's Next

Learn about Datadog for API monitoring.