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Elastic Docs ›Serverless ›Elastic Observability Serverless ›Application and service monitoring ›Application performance monitoring (APM) ›Act on application data

Create custom links

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Create custom links
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Required role

The Editor role or higher is required to create and manage custom links. To learn more, refer to Assign user roles and privileges.

Elastic’s custom link feature allows you to easily create up to 500 dynamic links based on your specific APM data. Custom links can be filtered to only appear for relevant services, environments, transaction types, or transaction names.

Ready to dive in? Jump straight to the examples.

Create a link

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Each custom link consists of a label, URL, and optional filter. The easiest way to create a custom link is from within the actions dropdown in the transaction detail page. This method will automatically apply filters, scoping the link to that specific service, environment, transaction type, and transaction name.

Alternatively, you can create a custom link by navigating to any page within Applications and selecting Settings → Custom Links → Create custom link.

Label

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The name of your custom link. The actions context menu displays this text, so keep it as short as possible.

Custom links are displayed alphabetically in the actions menu.

URL

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The URL your link points to. URLs support dynamic field name variables, encapsulated in double curly brackets: {{field.name}}. These variables will be replaced with transaction metadata when the link is clicked.

Because everyone’s data is different, you’ll need to examine your traces to see what metadata is available for use. To do this, select a trace and click Metadata in the Trace Sample table.

Example metadata

Filters

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Filter each link to only appear for specific services or transactions. You can filter on the following fields:

  • service.name
  • service.env
  • transaction.type
  • transaction.name

Multiple values are allowed when comma-separated.

Custom link examples

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Not sure where to start with custom links? Take a look at the examples below and customize them to your liking!

Email

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Email the owner of a service.

Label

Email <SERVICE_NAME> engineer

Link

mailto:<TEAM_OR_ENGINEER>@<COMPANY_NAME>.com

Filters

service.name:<SERVICE_NAME>

Example

This link opens an email addressed to the team or owner of python-backend. It will only appear on services with the name python-backend.

Label

Email python-backend engineers

Link

mailto:python_team@elastic.co

Filters

service.name:python-backend

GitHub issue

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Open a GitHub issue with prepopulated metadata from the selected trace sample.

Label

Open an issue in <REPO_NAME>

Link

https://github.com/<ORG>/<REPO>/issues/new?title=<TITLE>&body=<BODY>

Filters

service.name:client

Example

This link opens a new GitHub issue in the apm-agent-rum repository. It populates the issue body with relevant metadata from the currently active trace. Clicking this link results in the following issue being created:

Example github issue

Label

Open an issue in apm-rum-js

Link

https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-rum-js/issues/new?title=Investigate+APM+trace&body=Investigate+the+following+APM+trace%3A%0D%0A%0D%0Aservice.name%3A+{{service.name}}%0D%0Atransaction.id%3A+{{transaction.id}}%0D%0Acontainer.id%3A+{{container.id}}%0D%0Aurl.full%3A+{{url.full}}

Filters

service.name:client

See the GitHub automation documentation for a full list of supported query parameters.

Jira task

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Create a Jira task with prepopulated metadata from the selected trace sample.

Label

Open an issue in Jira

Link

https://<JIRA_BASE_URL>/secure/CreateIssueDetails!init.jspa?<ARGUMENTS>

Example

This link creates a new task on the Engineering board in Jira. It populates the issue body with relevant metadata from the currently active trace. Clicking this link results in the following task being created in Jira:

Example jira issue

Label

Open a task in Jira

Link

https://test-site-33.atlassian.net/secure/CreateIssueDetails!init.jspa?pid=10000&issuetype=10001&summary=Created+via+APM&description=Investigate+the+following+APM+trace%3A%0D%0A%0D%0Aservice.name%3A+{{service.name}}%0D%0Atransaction.id%3A+{{transaction.id}}%0D%0Acontainer.id%3A+{{container.id}}%0D%0Aurl.full%3A+{{url.full}}

See the Jira application administration knowledge base for a full list of supported query parameters.

Dashboards

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Link to a custom dashboard.

Label

Open transaction in custom visualization

Link

https://kibana-instance/app/kibana#/dashboard?_g=query:(language:kuery,query:'transaction.id:{{transaction.id}}'...

Example

This link opens the current transaction.id in a custom dashboard. There are no filters set.

Label

Open transaction in Python drilldown viz

URL

https://kibana-instance/app/kibana#/dashboard?_g=(filters:!(),refreshInterval:(pause:!t,value:0),time:(from:now-24h,to:now))&_a=(description:'',filters:!(),fullScreenMode:!f,options:(hidePanelTitles:!f,useMargins:!t),panels:!((embeddableConfig:(),gridData:(h:15,i:cb79c1c0-1af8-472c-aaf7-d158a76946fb,w:24,x:0,y:0),id:c8c74b20-6a30-11ea-92ab-b5d3feff11df,panelIndex:cb79c1c0-1af8-472c-aaf7-d158a76946fb,type:visualization,version:'7.7')),query:(language:kuery,query:'transaction.id:{{transaction.id}}'),timeRestore:!f,title:'',viewMode:edit)

Slack channel

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Open a specified slack channel.

Label

Open SLACK_CHANNEL

Link

https://COMPANY_SLACK.slack.com/archives/SLACK_CHANNEL

Filters

service.name : SERVICE_NAME

Example

This link opens a company slack channel, #apm-user-support. It only appears when transaction.name is GET user/login.

Label

Open #apm-user-support

Link

https://COMPANY_SLACK.slack.com/archives/efk52kt23k

Filters

transaction.name:GET user/login

Website

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Open an internal or external website.

Label

Open <WEBSITE>

Link

https://<COMPANY_SLACK>.slack.com/archives/<SLACK_CHANNEL>

Filters

service.name:<SERVICE_NAME>

Example

This link opens more data on a specific user.email. It only appears on front-end transactions.

Label

View user internally

Link

https://internal-site.company.com/user/{{user.email}}

Filters

service.name:client
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