Intake API

The Intake API is what we call the internal protocol that APM agents use to talk to the APM Server. This API has been redesigned in 6.5. Read the upgrading to 6.5 guide for more information.

APM Agents communicate with the APM server by sending events in an HTTP request. Each event is sent as its own line in the HTTP request body. This is known as newline delimited JSON (NDJSON). The request body looks roughly like this:

{"metadata": {"service": {"name": "ecommerce-front"}}}
{"span": {"name": "SELECT FROM products", "duration": 323, "transaction_id": "A"}}
{"span": {"name": "SELECT FROM users", "duration": 202, "transaction_id": "A"}}
{"transaction": {"name": "GET /index", "id": "A"}}

With NDJSON, agents can open an HTTP POST request and use chunked encoding to stream events to the APM Server as soon as they are recorded in the agent. This makes it simple for agents to serialize each event to a stream of newline delimited JSON.

The APM Server also treats the HTTP body as a compressed stream and thus reads and handles each event independently.

The APM Server exposes endpoints for