Troubleshooting

This section provides solutions to common questions and problems.

When adding too many distinct tag keys on a transaction or span, you risk creating a mapping explosion.

For example, you should avoid that user-specified data, like URL parameters, is used as a tag key. Likewise, using the current timestamp or a user ID as a tag key is not a good idea. However, tag values with a high cardinality are not a problem. Just try to keep the number of distinct tag keys at a minimum.

The symptom of a mapping explosion is that transactions and spans are not indexed anymore after a certain time. Usually, on the next day, the spans and transactions will be indexed again because a new index is created each day. But as soon as the field limit is reached, indexing stops again.

The most likely cause for this error is using an incompatible version of an APM agent. See minimum supported APM agent versions to verify compatibility.

APM agents communicate with the Managed intake service by sending events in an HTTP request. Each event is sent as its own line in the HTTP request body. If events are too large, you can reduce the size of the events that your APM agents send by: enabling span compression or reducing collected stack trace information.

The API key is invalid.

For additional help with other APM components, see the links below. Elastic Agent and each APM agent has its own troubleshooting guide:

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