Configure APM agent configuration

APM agent configuration allows you to fine-tune your APM agents from within the Applications UI. Changes are automatically propagated to your APM agents, so there’s no need to redeploy your applications.

To learn more about this feature, see APM agent configuration.

Here’s a sample configuration:

apm-server.agent.config.cache.expiration: 45s
apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch.api_key: TiNAGG4BaaMdaH1tRfuU:KnR6yE41RrSowb0kQ0HWoA

The following options are only supported for APM Server binary users. You can specify these options in the apm-server.agent.config section of the apm-server.yml config file:

When using APM agent configuration, information fetched from Elasticsearch will be cached in memory for some time. Specify the cache expiration time via this setting. Defaults to 30s (30 seconds).

Takes the same options as output.elasticsearch.

For APM Server binary users and Elastic Agent standalone-managed APM Server, APM agent configuration is automatically fetched from Elasticsearch using the output.elasticsearch configuration. If output.elasticsearch isn’t set or doesn’t have sufficient privileges, use these Elasticsearch options to provide Elasticsearch access.

You may see either of the following HTTP 403 errors from APM Server when it attempts to fetch APM agent configuration:

APM agent log:

"Your Elasticsearch configuration does not support agent config queries. Check your configurations at `output.elasticsearch` or `apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch`."

APM Server log:

rejecting fetch request: no valid elasticsearch config

This occurs because the user or API key set in either apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch or output.elasticsearch (if apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch is not set) does not have adequate permissions to read source maps from Elasticsearch.

To fix this error, ensure that APM Server has all the required privileges. See Use feature roles for more details.