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Get started with traces and APM

Stack Serverless

Elastic APM receives performance data from your APM agents, validates and processes it, and then transforms the data into Elasticsearch documents.

In this guide you’ll learn how to collect and send Application Performance Monitoring (APM) data to Elastic, then explore and visualize the data in real time.

Note

For a general Elastic Observability overview, refer to Get started with observability.

Follow these steps to send APM data to Elastic.

Required role

For Observability Serverless projects, the Admin role or higher is required to send APM data to Elastic. To learn more, refer to Assign user roles and privileges.

  1. Create an Observability project

    An Elastic Observability Serverless project allows you to run Elastic Observability Serverless in an autoscaled and fully-managed environment, where you don’t have to manage the underlying Elasticsearch cluster or Kibana instances.

    Steps for creating a project
    Note

    The Admin role or higher is required to create projects. Refer to Assign user roles and privileges.

    1. Navigate to cloud.elastic.co and log in to your account, or create one.

    2. Select Create serverless project.

    3. Under Elastic for Observability, select Next.

    4. Enter a name for your project.

    5. (Optional) Select Edit settings to change your project settings:

      • Cloud provider: The cloud platform where you’ll deploy your project. We currently support Amazon Web Services (AWS).
      • Region: The region where your project will live.

    6. Select Create project. It takes a few minutes to create your project.

    7. When the project is ready, click Continue.

  2. Add data using EDOT or APM Agents

    To send APM data to Elastic, you must install an Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry or an APM agent and configure it to send data to your project:

    1. Bring traces, logs, and metrics into Elastic APM to help you troubleshoot and optimize your applications. You can collect this data using OpenTelemetry or APM Server.

      Steps for collecting application traces, metrics, and logs

      The Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) SDKs facilitate the collection of traces, metrics, and logs in OpenTelemetry format into Elastic APM.

      1. Select Add data from the main menu and then select Application.
      2. Select OpenTelemetry.
      3. Follow the instructions for your platform.

      Use the APM agents to collect traces, metrics, and logs through APM Server.

      1. Select Add data from the main menu and then select Application.
      2. Select Elastic APM.
      3. Select the tab for your language or framework.
      4. Follow the instructions in the tab.

    2. If you’re using the step-by-step instructions in the UI, after you’ve installed and configured an agent, you can click Check Agent Status to verify that the agent is sending data.

    To learn more about APM agents, including how to fine-tune how agents send traces to Elastic, refer to Collect application data.

  3. View your data

    After one or more APM agents are installed and successfully sending data, you can view application performance monitoring data in the UI.

    In the Applications section of the main menu, select Service Inventory. This will show a high-level overview of the health and general performance of all your services.

    Learn more about visualizing APM data in View and analyze data.

    Tip

    Not seeing any data? Find helpful tips in Troubleshooting.

Now that data is streaming into your project, take your investigation to a deeper level. Learn how to use Elastic’s built-in visualizations for APM data, alert on APM data, or fine-tune how agents send traces to Elastic.