Core configuration options

A boolean specifying if the agent should be recording or not. When recording, the agent captures HTTP requests, tracks errors, and collects and sends metrics. When not recording, the agent works as a noop, not collecting data and not communicating with the APM server, except for polling the central configuration endpoint. As this is a reversible switch, agent threads are not killed when inactivated, but they will be mostly idle in this state, so the overhead should be negligible.

You can use this setting to dynamically disable Elastic APM at runtime.

Setting to false will completely disable the agent, including instrumentation and remote config polling. If you want to dynamically change the status of the agent, use recording instead.

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.

Optional name used to differentiate between nodes in a service. If not set, data aggregations will be done based on a container ID (where valid) or on the reported hostname (automatically discovered).

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.

Allows for the reported hostname to be manually specified. If unset, the hostname will be looked up.

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

Environments allow you to easily filter data on a global level in the APM app. It’s important to be consistent when naming environments across agents. See environment selector in the Kibana UI for more information.

By default, the agent will sample every transaction (e.g. a 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. The agent will still record the overall time and result for unsampled transactions, but no context information, labels, or spans will be recorded.

This setting can be changed after agent’s start.

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, for example, thousands of SQL queries. Setting an upper limit helps prevent overloading the Agent and APM server in these edge cases.

This setting can be changed after agent’s start.

If set to true, the agent makes periodic requests to the APM Server to fetch the latest APM Agent configuration.

Sometimes it is necessary to sanitize, i.e., remove, sensitive data sent to Elastic APM. This config accepts a list of wildcard patterns of field names which should be sanitized. These apply for example to HTTP headers and application/x-www-form-urlencoded data.

The wildcard, *, matches zero or more characters, and matching is case insensitive by default. Prepending an element with (?-i) makes the matching case sensitive. Examples: /foo/*/bar/*/baz*, *foo*.

You should review the data captured by Elastic APM carefully to make sure it does not contain sensitive information. If you do find sensitive data in your Elasticsearch index, you should add an additional entry to this list. Make sure to include the default entries as well, as setting a value here will overwrite the defaults.

Labels added to all events. Labels are key=value pairs, where key is the label name and value is the label value. Separate multiple labels with a comma. For example, label1=value1,label2=value2. Any labels set by the application via the agent’s public API will override global labels with the same keys.