Elastic APM Node.js Agent
This is the official Node.js application performance monitoring
(APM) agent for the Elastic Observability solution. It is a Node.js package
that runs with your Node.js application to automatically capture errors, tracing
data, and performance metrics. APM data is sent to your Elastic Observability
deployment -- hosted in Elastic's cloud or in
your own on-premises deployment -- where you can monitor your application,
create alerts, and quick identify root causes of service issues.
If you have any feedback or questions, please post them on the
Discuss forum.
Installation
npm install --save elastic-apm-node
Getting started
First, you will need an Elastic Stack deployment. This is a deployment of APM
Server (which receives APM data from the APM agent running in your application),
Elasticsearch (the database that stores all APM data), and Kibana (the
application that provides the interface to visualize and analyze the data). If
you do not already have an Elastic deployment to use, follow this APM Quick
Start guide
to create a free trial on Elastic's cloud. From this deployment you will need
the APM serverUrl and secretToken (or a configured apiKey) to use
for configuring the APM agent.
Next, the best and easiest way to see how to install and start the APM agent is to follow
one of the "Get started" guides
for the web framework or technology that you are using:
Typically, the quick start steps are:
-
Install the APM agent package as a dependency:
npm install --save elastic-apm-node
-
Configure and start the APM agent. For the APM agent's automatic
instrumentation of popular modules to work, it must be started before your
application imports its other dependencies. For example, if you use
CommonJS, then put this at the very top of your main application file:
require('elastic-apm-node').start({
serverUrl: '<serverUrl from your Elastic Stack deployment>',
secretToken: '<secretToken from your Elastic Stack deployment>'
serviceName: '...', // https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/nodejs/current/configuration.html#service-name
environment: '...', // https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/nodejs/current/configuration.html#environment
});
There are other ways to start the APM agent: for example, to support starting
the APM agent without having to change application code; or to avoid certain
surprises when using TypeScript or other transpilers like Babel or esbuild. See
Starting the agent
for a reference of all ways to start the agent and for details on gotchas
with transpilers and bundlers (like Webpack and esbuild).
If your application is using ES modules, please see ECMAScript module support
for the current experimental support.
Documentation
The full Node.js APM agent documentation is here.
Some important links:
- Release notes
- Supported Technologies describes the supported Node.js versions, which modules (and version ranges) are automatically traced, and other technologies.
- Configuring the agent describes the different ways to configure the APM agent (via options to
apm.start(...), environment variables, or other mechanisms).
- Configuration options is a full configuration reference.
- Troubleshooting describes some common issues and a way to get debugging output from the APM agent for bug reports.
- Upgrading includes a guide for upgrading from each past major version of the APM agent.
- Metrics describes the metrics that the APM agent automatically collects.
- The APM agent includes an OpenTelemetry Bridge that allows one to use the vendor-agnostic OpenTelemetry API for manual instrumentation in your application, should you require manual instrumentation.
Active release branches
The following git branches are active:
Contributing
Contributions are very welcome. You can get in touch with us through our
Discuss forum. If you have
found an issue, you can open an issue at https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-nodejs/issues.
If you are considering contributing code to the APM agent, please read our
contribution guide.
Please see TESTING.md for instructions on how to run the test suite.
License
BSD-2-Clause
Made with ♥️ by Elastic and our community.
