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Tracing APIs

Serverless Observability

Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Stack

The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

APM Agent Java

The Elastic APM Java agent enables you to trace the execution of operations in your Java applications, sending performance metrics and errors to the Elastic APM Server.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

There are three different ways enhance the out-of-the-box instrumentation of the Java agent with manual instrumentation:

  1. Public API
    A simple and stable API that is most native to the agent. Contains annotations to declaratively create spans.
  2. OpenTelemetry bridge
    A vendor neutral API. If you plan to do a lot of manual instrumentation and want to reduce vendor lock-in this is probably what you’re looking for.
  3. OpenTracing bridge
    A vendor neutral API that is discontinued in favor of OpenTelemetry.

A further option is the plugin api which uses the OpenTelemetry API and allows you to add in custom instrumentation without modifying the application.

All APIs allow for different operation modes in combination with the Elastic APM agent

Noop
If the agent is not installed, the APIs are in noop mode and do not actually record and report spans.
Mix and Match
If you want to leverage the auto instrumentation of Elastic APM, but also want to create custom spans or use the API to add custom labels to the spans created by Elastic APM, you can just do that.
Manual instrumentation

If you don’t want Elastic APM to auto-instrument known frameworks, but instead only rely on manual instrumentation, disable the auto instrumentation setting the configuration option instrument to false.