Configure Real User Monitoring (RUM)

The Real User Monitoring (RUM) agent captures user interactions with clients such as web browsers. These interactions are sent as events to the APM Server. Because the RUM agent runs on the client side, the connection between agent and server is unauthenticated. As a security precaution, RUM is therefore disabled by default. To enable it, set apm-server.rum.enabled to true in your APM Server configuration file.

In addition, if APM Server is deployed in an origin different than the page’s origin, you will need to configure Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in the Agent.

Example config with RUM enabled:

apm-server.rum.enabled: true
apm-server.auth.anonymous.rate_limit.event_limit: 300
apm-server.auth.anonymous.rate_limit.ip_limit: 1000
apm-server.auth.anonymous.allow_service: [your_service_name]
apm-server.rum.allow_origins: ['*']
apm-server.rum.allow_headers: ["header1", "header2"]
apm-server.rum.library_pattern: "node_modules|bower_components|~"
apm-server.rum.exclude_from_grouping: "^/webpack"
apm-server.rum.source_mapping.enabled: true
apm-server.rum.source_mapping.cache.expiration: 5m
apm-server.rum.source_mapping.index_pattern: "apm-*-sourcemap*"

Specify the following options in the apm-server.rum section of the apm-server.yml config file:

To enable RUM support, set apm-server.rum.enabled to true. By default this is disabled.

The maximum number of events allowed per second, per agent IP address.

Default: 300

The number of unique IP addresses to track in an LRU cache. IP addresses in the cache will be rate limited according to the rate_limit.event_limit setting. Consider increasing this default if your site has many concurrent clients.

Default: 1000

A list of permitted service names for RUM support. Names in this list must match the agent’s service.name. This can be set to restrict RUM events to those with one of a set of known service names, in order to limit the number of service-specific indices or data streams created.

Default: Not set (any service name is accepted)

A list of permitted origins for RUM support. User-agents send an Origin header that will be validated against this list. This is done automatically by modern browsers as part of the CORS specification. An origin is made of a protocol scheme, host and port, without the URL path.

Default: ['*'] (allows everything)

HTTP requests made from the RUM agent to the APM Server are limited in the HTTP headers they are allowed to have. If any other headers are added, the request will be rejected by the browser due to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) restrictions. Use this setting to allow additional headers. The default list of allowed headers includes "Content-Type", "Content-Encoding", and "Accept"; custom values configured here are appended to the default list and used as the value for the Access-Control-Allow-Headers header.

Default: []

Custom HTTP headers to add to RUM responses. This can be useful for security policy compliance.

Values set for the same key will be concatenated.

Default: Not set

RegExp to be matched against a stacktrace frame’s file_name and abs_path attributes. If the RegExp matches, the stacktrace frame is considered to be a library frame. When source mapping is applied, the error.culprit is set to reflect the function and the filename of the first non library frame. This aims to provide an entry point for identifying issues.

Default: "node_modules|bower_components|~"

RegExp to be matched against a stacktrace frame’s file_name. If the RegExp matches, the stacktrace frame is excluded from being used for calculating error groups.

Default: "^/webpack" (excludes stacktrace frames that have a filename starting with /webpack)

Used to enable/disable sourcemapping for RUM events.

Default: true

Configure the Elasticsearch source map retrieval location, taking the same options as output.elasticsearch. This must be set when using an output other than Elasticsearch, and that output is writing to Elasticsearch. Otherwise leave this section empty.

If a source map has been uploaded to the APM Server, source mapping is automatically applied to documents sent to the RUM endpoint. Source maps are fetched from Elasticsearch and then kept in an in-memory cache for the configured time. Values configured without a time unit are treated as seconds.

Default: 5m (5 minutes)

Source maps are stored in a separate index apm-%{[observer.version]}-sourcemap by default. If changed, a matching index pattern needs to be specified here.

Default: "apm-*-sourcemap*"

The default APM Server pipeline includes processors that enrich RUM data prior to indexing in Elasticsearch. See the default ingest pipeline for details on how to locate, edit, or disable this pre-processing.