Configuration

To adapt the Elastic APM agent to your needs, you can configure it using environment variables, or framework specific configuration.

You can either configure the agent by setting environment variables:

ELASTIC_APM_SERVICE_NAME=foo python manage.py runserver

or with inline configuration:

apm_client = Client(service_name="foo")

or by using framework specific configuration e.g. in your Django settings.py file:

ELASTIC_APM = {
    "SERVICE_NAME": "foo",
}

The precedence is as follows:

To configure Django, add an ELASTIC_APM dictionary to your settings.py:

ELASTIC_APM = {
    'SERVICE_NAME': 'my-app',
    'SECRET_TOKEN': 'changeme',
}

To configure Flask, add an ELASTIC_APM dictonary to your app.config:

app.config['ELASTIC_APM'] = {
    'SERVICE_NAME': 'my-app',
    'SECRET_TOKEN': 'changeme',
}

apm = ElasticAPM(app)

The name of your service. This is used to keep all the errors and transactions of your service together and is the primary filter in the Elastic APM user interface.

The URL for your APM Server. The URL must be fully qualified, including protocol (http or https) and port.

The transport class to use when sending events to the APM server. The default AsyncTransport uses a background thread to send data. If your environment doesn’t allow background threads, you can use elasticapm.transport.http.Transport instead. Note however that this can have adverse effects on performance.

The name of the environment this service is deployed in, e.g. "production" or "staging".

This string is used to ensure that only your agents can send data to your APM server. Both the agents and the APM server have to be configured with the same secret token. One example to generate a secure secret token is:

python -c "import uuid; print(str(uuid.uuid4()))"

A version string for the currently deployed version of the service. If you don’t version your deployments, the recommended value for this field is the commit identifier of the deployed revision, e.g. the output of git rev-parse HEAD.

Name of the used framework. For Django and Flask, this defaults to django and flask respectively, otherwise, the default is None.

Version number of the used framework. For Django and Flask, this defaults to the used version of the framework, otherwise, the default is None.

A list of exception types to be filtered. Exceptions of these types will not be sent to the APM server.

A list of regular expressions. Transactions that match any of the of the configured patterns will be ignored and not sent to the APM server.

A timeout in seconds. If a request to the APM server takes longer than the configured timeout, the request is cancelled and the event (exception or transaction) is discarded. Set to None to disable timeouts.

The host name to use when sending error and transaction data to the APM server.

If set to True (the default), the agent will add a stack trace to each log event, indicating where the log message has been issued.

This setting can be overridden on an individual basis by setting the extra-key stack:

logger.info('something happened', extra={'stack': False})

Possible values: errors, transactions, all, off

The Elastic APM Python agent can collect local variables for stack frames. By default, this is only done for errors.

When collecting local variables, they will be converted to strings. With this setting, you can limit the length of resulting string.

With this setting, you can limit the length of lists in local variables.

By default, the APM agent collects source code snippets for errors. With the above settings, you can modify how many lines of source code is collected.

We differ between errors and spans, as well as library frames and app frames.

For transactions that are HTTP requests, the Python agent can optionally capture the request body (e.g. POST variables).

Possible values: errors, transactions, all, off.

If the request has a body and this setting is disabled, the body will be shown as [REDACTED].

For requests with a content type of multipart/form-data, any uploaded files will be referenced in a special _files key. It contains the name of the field, and the name of the uploaded file, if provided.

Interval with which transactions should be sent to the APM server, in seconds. A lower value will increase the load on your APM server, while a higher value can increase the memory pressure on your app. A higher value also impacts the time until transactions are indexed and searchable in Elasticsearch.

Limits the amount of spans that are recorded per transaction. This is helpful in cases where a transaction creates a very high amount of spans (e.g. thousands of SQL queries). Setting an upper limit will prevent overloading the agent and the APM server with too much work for such edge cases.

In its default settings, the APM agent will collect a stack trace with every recorded span. While this is very helpful to find the exact place in your code that causes the span, collecting this stack trace does have some overhead.

To collect traces for all spans, independent of the length, set the value to -1. Setting it to a positive value, e.g. 5, will limit stack trace collection to spans with durations equal or longer than the given value in milliseconds, e.g. 5 milliseconds.

To disable stack trace collection for spans completely, set the value to 0.

Maximum queue length of transactions before sending transactions to the APM server. A lower value will increase the load on your APM server, while a higher value can increase the memory pressure of your app. A higher value also impacts the time until transactions are indexed and searchable in Elasticsearch.

This setting is useful to limit memory consumption if you experience a sudden spike of traffic.

A list of processors to process transactions and errors. For more information, see Sanitizing Data.

By default, the agent will sample every transaction (e.g. request to your service). To reduce overhead and storage requirements, you can set the sample rate to a value between 0.0 and 1.0. We still record overall time and the result for unsampled transactions, but no context information, tags, or spans.

A set of paths, optionally using shell globs (see fnmatch for a description of the syntax). These are matched against the absolute filename of every frame, and if a pattern matches, the frame is considered to be an "in-app frame".

include_paths takes precedence over exclude_paths.

A set of paths, optionally using shell globs (see fnmatch for a description of the syntax). These are matched against the absolute filename of every frame, and if a pattern matches, the frame is considered to be a "library frame".

include_paths takes precedence over exclude_paths.

The default value varies based on your Python version and implementation, e.g.:

If your app is in debug mode (e.g. in Django with settings.DEBUG = True or in Flask with app.debug = True), the agent won’t send any data to the APM server. You can override it by changing this setting to True.

If set to True, the agent won’t send any events to the APM server, independent of any debug state.

If set to False, the agent won’t instrument any code. This disables most of the tracing functionality, but can be useful to debug possible instrumentation issues.

By default, the agent verifies the SSL certificate if you use an HTTPS connection to the APM server. Verification can be disabled by changing this setting to False.