Manage your APM & Fleet Server (7.13+)

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Beginning with Elastic Stack version 8.0, Integrations Server is replacing APM & Fleet Server. New deployments with version 8.0 will use Integrations Server automatically. Existing deployments using APM & Fleet Server will continue to use APM & Fleet Server after upgrading to version 8.0.

Beginning with Elastic Stack version 7.16, the APM integration for Elastic Agent is generally available! This new APM ecosystem brings a number of new benefits to Elastic APM. Check Switch to the Elastic APM integration to learn more.

In ECE version 2.10 with the original Elastic Stack pack version 7.14, if downloaded from the Elastic website before August 10, 2021, Fleet does not work when enabled in a deployment. To support Fleet, you can get and re-upload a fresh copy of the version 7.14 Elastic Stack pack to overwrite the original one. If you have existing version 7.14 deployments, then restart Fleet/APM after re-uploading the Elastic Stack pack to enable Fleet. This issue will be addressed in later stack packs and ECE versions.

For deployments that are version 7.13 and later, you have the option to add a combined Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Server and Fleet Server to your deployment. APM allows you to monitor software services and applications in real time, turning that data into documents stored in the Elasticsearch cluster. Fleet allows you to centrally manage Elastic Agents on many hosts.

As part of provisioning, the APM Server and Fleet Server are already configured to work with Elasticsearch and Kibana. At the end of provisioning, you are shown the secret token to configure communication between the APM Server and the backend APM Agents. The APM Agents get deployed within your services and applications.

From the deployment APM & Fleet page you can also:

  • Get the URL to complete the APM agent configuration.
  • Use the elastic credentials to go to the APM area of Kibana. Step by step instructions to configure a variety of agents are available right in Kibana. After that, you can use the pre-built, dedicated dashboards and the APM tab to visualize the data that is sent back from the APM Agents.
  • Use the elastic credentials to go to the Fleet area of Kibana. Step by step instructions to download and install Elastic Agent on your hosts are available right in Kibana. After that, you can manage enrolled Elastic Agents on the Agents tab, and the data shipped back from those Elastic Agents on the Data streams tab.
  • Reset the APM secret token.

    Resetting the token disrupts your APM service and restarts the server. When the server restarts, you’ll need to update all of your agents with the new token.

  • Access the APM & Fleet logs and metrics.
  • Stop and restart your APM & Fleet Server.
  • Upgrade your APM & Fleet Server version if it is out of sync with your Elasticsearch cluster.
  • Fully remove the APM & Fleet Server, delete it from the disk, and stop the charges.

Upgrading to Elastic Stack 8.0

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The following APM settings have been removed in Elastic Stack version 8.0. This change is only relevant to users upgrading a standalone (legacy) deployment of APM Server to Elastic Stack version 8.0. Check Add APM user settings for more details.

apm-server.api_key.enabled
apm-server.api_key.limit
apm-server.ilm.*
apm-server.frontend.*
apm-server.register.*
apm-server.rum.allow_service_names
apm-server.rum.event_rate.lru_size
apm-server.rum.event_rate.limit
apm-server.rum.rate_limit
output.elasticsearch.bulk_max_size
output.elasticsearch.index
output.elasticsearch.indices
output.elasticsearch.pipeline
output.elasticsearch.pipelines
output.elasticsearch.worker
setup.*
queue.*

Upgrading to ECE 2.10

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When you upgrade an ECE installation to version 2.10 or higher, you need to apply a no-op plan to any existing APM-enabled, version 7.13+ deployment to make Fleet Server available. To apply a no-op plan, perform a rolling update on your deployment without applying any configuration changes:

  1. On the Deployments page, select your deployment.
  2. From your deployment menu, go to the Edit page.
  3. Select Save.

Routing to Fleet Server

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Because Fleet Server and APM Server live on the same instance, an additional part is added to the Fleet Server hostname to help distinguish between the traffic to each. If you have not configured support for deployment aliases, your certificate may not be configured to expect this extra part.

Data is routed to APM using the same hostname <<apm-id>>.<<your-domain>>, but two new endpoints are introduced:

  • <<deployment-id>>.apm.<<your-domain>> as an alternate endpoint for APM
  • <<deployment-id>>.fleet.<<your-domain>> is the only way of routing data to Fleet Server

New certificates must be generated for both these endpoints. Check Enable custom endpoint aliases for more details.