Breaking Changes

This section describes the breaking changes and deprecations introduced in this release and previous minor versions.

The following breaking changes are introduced in APM version 8.11.0:

The following breaking changes are introduced in APM version 8.10.0:

The following breaking changes and deprecations are introduced in APM version 8.7.0:

The following breaking changes and deprecations are introduced in APM version 8.6.0:

The stack monitoring metrics, apm-server.decoder.*, are no longer recorded. These metrics were not used by stack monitoring, so there should be no noticeable change.

For more details, see PR #9210.

New field mappings enforce integer values for context.http.response.*_size. The fields are mapped with index: false to minimize storage overhead.

For more details, see PR #9429.

observer.id and observer.ephemeral_id are no longer added to APM documents. The APM UI does not currently rely on these field, so there should be no noticeable change.

For more details, see PR #9412.

timeseries.instance has been removed from transaction metrics docs. The APM UI did not use this field, so there should be no noticeable change.

For more details, see PR #9565.

The following breaking changes are introduced in APM version 8.2.0:

APM Server no longer emits events with a transaction.duration.us or span.duration.us. Instead, events are emitted with an event.duration. An ingest pipeline sets the legacy <event>.duration.us field and removes the event.duration.

This change will impact users who are not using APM Server’s Elasticsearch output or the packaged ingest pipeline. For details, see PR #7261.

The field observer.version_major is non-standard and existed only for the APM UI to filter out legacy docs (versions <7.0). This check is no longer performed, so the field has been removed.

For details, see PR #7399.

As of version 8.1.0, all Linux distributions supported by APM Server support systemd. As a result, APM Server no longer ships with System V init scripts or the go-daemon wrapper; use systemd instead.

For details, see PR #7576.

APM Server support for 32-bit architectures has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

There are no breaking changes in APM.

The following breaking changes are introduced in APM version 8.0.

All index management has been removed from APM Server; Fleet is now entirely responsible for setting up index templates, index lifecycle polices, and index pipelines.

As a part of this change, the following settings have been removed:

APM Server now only writes to well-defined data streams; writing to classic indices is no longer supported.

As a part of this change, the following settings have been removed:

APM Server has a new Elasticsearch output implementation; it is no longer necessary to manually tune the output of APM Server.

As a part of this change, the following settings have been removed:

The source map upload endpoint has been removed from APM Server. Source maps should now be uploaded directly to Kibana instead.

The legacy Jaeger gRPC and HTTP endpoints have been removed from APM Server.

As a part of this change, the following settings have been removed:

APM Server no longer supports installation via Homebrew.

Below is a list of all removed settings (in alphabetical order) for users upgrading a standalone APM Server to Elastic Stack version 8.0.

apm-server.data_streams.enabled
apm-server.ilm.*
apm-server.jaeger
apm-server.register.ingest.pipeline.*
apm-server.sampling.keep_unsampled
output.elasticsearch.bulk_max_size
output.elasticsearch.index
output.elasticsearch.indices
output.elasticsearch.pipeline
output.elasticsearch.pipelines
output.elasticsearch.worker
queue.*
setup.*

Below is a list of renamed settings (in alphabetical order) for users upgrading a standalone APM Server to Elastic Stack version 8.0.

previous setting                --> new setting

apm-server.api_key              --> apm-server.auth.api_key
apm-server.instrumentation      --> instrumentation
apm-server.rum.allowed_service  --> apm-server.auth.anonymous.allow_service
apm-server.rum.event_rate       --> apm-server.auth.anonymous.rate_limit
apm-server.secret_token         --> apm-server.auth.secret_token

Below is a list of all supported settings (in alphabetical order) for users upgrading an Elastic Cloud standalone cluster to Elastic Stack version 8.0. Any previously supported settings not listed below will be removed when upgrading.

apm-server.agent.config.cache.expiration
apm-server.aggregation.transactions.*
apm-server.auth.anonymous.allow_agent
apm-server.auth.anonymous.allow_service
apm-server.auth.anonymous.rate_limit.event_limit
apm-server.auth.anonymous.rate_limit.ip_limit
apm-server.auth.api_key.enabled
apm-server.auth.api_key.limit
apm-server.capture_personal_data
apm-server.default_service_environment
apm-server.max_event_size
apm-server.rum.allow_headers
apm-server.rum.allow_origins
apm-server.rum.enabled
apm-server.rum.exclude_from_grouping
apm-server.rum.library_pattern
apm-server.rum.source_mapping.enabled
apm-server.rum.source_mapping.cache.expiration
logging.level
logging.selectors
logging.metrics.enabled
logging.metrics.period
max_procs
output.elasticsearch.flush_bytes
output.elasticsearch.flush_interval