Elastic APM utilizes Elasticsearch’s cross-cluster search functionality. Cross-cluster search lets you run a single search request against one or more remote clusters — making it easy to search APM data across multiple sources. This means you can also have deployments per data type, making sizing and scaling more predictable, and allowing for better performance while managing multiple observability use cases.

Set up cross-cluster searchedit

Step 1. Set up remote clusters.

If you’re using the Hosted Elasticsearch Service, see Enable cross-cluster search.

You can add remote clusters directly in Kibana, under Management > Elasticsearch > Remote clusters. All you need is a name for the remote cluster and the seed node(s). Remember the names of your remote clusters, you’ll need them in step two. See managing remote clusters for detailed information on the setup process.

Alternatively, you can configure remote clusters in Elasticsearch’s elasticsearch.yml file.

Step 2. Edit the default APM app index pattern.

The APM app index pattern determines from which clusters and indices to display data. Index patterns follow this convention: <cluster-names>:<pattern>. The default value is apm-*, which displays data from any index beginning with apm-.

To display data from the local cluster, and all remote clusters, you’ll need to update the index pattern to: *:apm-*,apm-*. You can also specify certain clusters to display data from, for example, obs-1:apm-*,obs-2:apm-*.

There are two ways to edit the default index pattern: