Upgrade a self-installation of the APM integration to 9.0

Elastic Stack

This upgrade guide is for the Elastic APM integration. Only use this guide if both of the following are true:

• You have a self-installation of the Elastic Stack, i.e. you’re not using Elastic Cloud.
• You have already switched to and are running Fleet and the Elastic APM integration.

1. Before you upgrade to version 9.0, you must upgrade Elasticsearch and Kibana to the latest patch version of 8.18. For more details, refer to the Elastic Stack Installation and Upgrade Guide.
2. Review the Elastic APM release notes and Elastic Observability release notes.
3. Review the Elastic APM breaking changes.

1. Upgrade the Elastic Stack to version 9.0.

   The Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch and Kibana) must be upgraded before Elastic Agent. refer to the Elastic Stack Installation and Upgrade Guide for guidance.

2. Upgrade Elastic Agent to version 9.0 As a part of this process, the APM integration will automatically upgrade to version 9.0.

   1. In Fleet, select Agents.
   2. Under Agents, click Upgrade available for a list of agents that you can upgrade.
   3. Choose Upgrade agent from the Actions menu next to the agent you want to upgrade. The Upgrade agent option is grayed out when an upgrade is unavailable, or the Kibana version is lower than the agent version.

   For more details, or for bulk upgrade instructions, refer to Upgrade Elastic Agent

3. When upgrading from 8.18 to 9.0, if you have 7.x indices, you need to either set the indices to readonly, or if reindexing, add ILM privileges for reindexed-v*-apm* indices.