Infrastructure

The Infrastructure tab provides information about the containers, pods, and hosts that the selected service is linked to. The data sources and navigation behavior depend on whether the service is instrumented with Elastic APM or OpenTelemetry (OTel).

IT ops and software reliability engineers (SREs) can use this tab to quickly find a service’s underlying infrastructure resources when debugging a problem. Knowing what infrastructure is related to a service allows you to remediate issues by restarting, killing hanging instances, changing configuration, rolling back deployments, scaling up, scaling out, and so on.

Tip

Why is the infrastructure tab empty?

If there is no data in the Application UI’s infrastructure tab for a selected service, you can read more about why this happens and how to fix it in the troubleshooting docs.

Elastic APM-instrumented services

For services instrumented with Elastic APM, the tab uses the following data sources:

Pods: Uses the kubernetes.pod.name from the APM metrics data streams.
Containers: Uses the container.id from the APM metrics data streams.
Hosts: If the application is containerized—if the APM metrics documents include container.id—the host.name is used from the infrastructure data streams (filtered by container.id). If not, host.hostname is used from the APM metrics data streams.

Example view of the Infrastructure tab in the Applications UI

OTel-instrumented services

For services instrumented with OpenTelemetry, the tab exclusively shows OTel-observed infrastructure. Click-through destinations differ by resource type:

Hosts: Links to the Hosts UI, which supports OpenTelemetry and its semantic conventions.
Containers and Pods: Link to Metrics in Discover.

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. Serverless interfaces and procedures might differ from classic Elastic Stack deployments. The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats. Availability Planned We plan to add this functionality in a future Elastic Stack update. Subject to changes. 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. The Infrastructure Inventory does show Kubernetes pods collected using OpenTelemetry, but this tab still links to Metrics in Discover for both containers and pods. Refer to Select the data collection schema for how that view chooses which pods to show.

Important

The Infrastructure tab assumes you're observing the service and its underlying infrastructure (hosts, pods, containers) using the same schema. The schema is inferred from the APM agent name:

Elastic APM Agent or Elastic Agent system integration: Queries ECS data from Metricbeat or Elastic Agent integrations.

OTel SDK or EDOT SDK: Queries OpenTelemetry semantic convention (semconv) data from the OTel Collector or Elastic Agent (for example, hostmetricsreceiver.otel, kubeletstatsreceiver.otel, dockerstatsreceiver.otel). Cross-schema setups show as N/A:

A service instrumented with Elastic APM or Elastic Agent, but running on infrastructure observed only by the OTel Collector.
A service instrumented with an OTel or EDOT SDK, but running on infrastructure observed only by Metricbeat or the Elastic Agent system, Kubernetes, or Docker integrations.

To see infrastructure metrics, make sure the service instrumentation and the infrastructure collector use the same schema.

Compare metrics in Discover

To compare infrastructure metric trends across all entities a service depends on, select the Hosts, Pods, or Containers tab, then click Compare metrics in Discover. This opens the data in Discover, broken down by entity so you can compare trends side by side.

The breakdown field for each resource type:

Resource	Breakdown field
Hosts	`host.name`
Pods	`k8s.pod.name`
Containers	`container.id`