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APM data types

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APM data types

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Elastic APM agents capture different types of information from within their instrumented applications. These are known as events, and can be spans, transactions, errors, or metrics:

  • Spans contain information about the execution of a specific code path. They measure from the start to the end of an activity, and they can have a parent/child relationship with other spans.
  • Transactions are a special kind of span that have additional attributes associated with them. They describe an event captured by an Elastic APM agent instrumenting a service. You can think of transactions as the highest level of work you’re measuring within a service.
  • Errors contain at least information about the original exception that occurred or about a log created when the exception occurred. For simplicity, errors are represented by a unique ID.
  • Metrics measure the state of a system by gathering information on a regular interval.
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