Configure the Console output
edit

The Console output writes events in JSON format to stdout.

The Console output should be used only for debugging issues as it can produce a large amount of logging data.

To use this output, edit the APM Server configuration file to disable the Elasticsearch output by commenting it out, and enable the console output by adding output.console.

Example configuration:

output.console:
  pretty: true
Configuration optionsedit

You can specify the following output.console options in the apm-server.yml config file:

enablededit

The enabled config is a boolean setting to enable or disable the output. If set to false, the output is disabled.

The default value is true.

prettyedit

If pretty is set to true, events written to stdout will be nicely formatted. The default is false.

codecedit

Output codec configuration. If the codec section is missing, events will be JSON encoded using the pretty option.

See Change the output codec for more information.

bulk_max_sizeedit

The maximum number of events to buffer internally during publishing. The default is 2048.

Specifying a larger batch size may add some latency and buffering during publishing. However, for Console output, this setting does not affect how events are published.

Setting bulk_max_size to values less than or equal to 0 disables the splitting of batches. When splitting is disabled, the queue decides on the number of events to be contained in a batch.

Change the output codecedit

For outputs that do not require a specific encoding, you can change the encoding by using the codec configuration. You can specify either the json or format codec. By default the json codec is used.

json.pretty: If pretty is set to true, events will be nicely formatted. The default is false.

json.escape_html: If escape_html is set to true, HTML symbols will be escaped in strings. The default is false.

Example configuration that uses the json codec with pretty printing enabled to write events to the console:

output.console:
  codec.json:
    pretty: true
    escape_html: false

format.string: Configurable format string used to create a custom formatted message.

Example configurable that uses the format codec to print the events timestamp and message field to console:

output.console:
  codec.format:
    string: '%{[@timestamp]} %{[message]}'