Configure APM agent central configuration

APM agent central configuration allows you to fine-tune your APM agents from within the Applications UI. Changes are automatically propagated to your APM agents, so there’s no need to redeploy your applications.

To learn more about this feature, see APM agent central configuration.

The following options are only supported for APM Server binary users.

You can specify APM agent configuration options in the apm-server.agent.config section of the apm-server.yml config file. Here’s a sample configuration:

apm-server.agent.config.cache.expiration: 45s
apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch.api_key: TiNAGG4BaaMdaH1tRfuU:KnR6yE41RrSowb0kQ0HWoA 

When using APM agent central configuration, information fetched from Elasticsearch will be cached in memory for some time. Specify the cache expiration time via this setting. Defaults to 30s (30 seconds).

Takes the same options as output.elasticsearch.

For APM Server binary users and Elastic Agent standalone-managed APM Server, APM agent central configuration is automatically fetched from Elasticsearch using the output.elasticsearch configuration. If output.elasticsearch isn’t set or doesn’t have sufficient privileges, use these Elasticsearch options to provide Elasticsearch access.

You may see either of the following HTTP 403 errors from APM Server when it attempts to fetch the APM agent central configuration:

APM agent log:

"Your Elasticsearch configuration does not support agent config queries. Check your configurations at `output.elasticsearch` or `apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch`."

APM Server log:

rejecting fetch request: no valid elasticsearch config

This occurs because the user or API key set in either apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch or output.elasticsearch (if apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch is not set) does not have adequate permissions to read source maps from Elasticsearch.

To fix this error, ensure that APM Server has all the required privileges. For more details, refer to Create a central configuration management role.

If you get an HTTP 401 error from APM Server, make sure that you’re using an API key that is configured to Beats. For details on how to create and configure a compatible API key, refer to Create an API key for writing events.