About Elastic APM

Elastic static consists of several components. For the usage of Elastic APM, there are four essential components: 

1. APM Agents
   

   APM agents are open source libraries written in the same language as your service. You may only need one, or you might use all of them. They instrument your code and collect performance data and errors at runtime. This data is buffered for a short period and sent on to APM Server.

2. APM Server
   APM Server is an open source application that receives performance data from your APM agents. It’s a separate component by design, which helps keep the agents light, prevents certain security risks, and improves compatibility across the Elastic Stack.

3. Elasticsearch
   

   Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open-source full-text search and analytics engine. It allows you to store, search, and analyze large volumes of data quickly and in near real time. Elasticsearch is used to store APM performance metrics and make use of its aggregations.

4. Kibana
   

   Kibana is an open source analytics and visualization platform designed to work with Elasticsearch. You use Kibana to search, view, and interact with data stored in Elasticsearch.

How to Use

There are 2 ways to use this component in your OutSystems Traditional Web application:

1. ElasticRUM_Initialize action - add this action to the preparation of the pages to monitor, or if to monitor all pages of an application, add to the preparation of the layout. Only available to use in dotNET based applications.

2. ElasticRUM_Initialize block - add this block to the top most part of the pages to monitor, or if to monitor all pages of an application, add to top of the layout. 

Both options require 3 parameters from Elastic: server URL, service name, and service version:

(see below how to configure and obtain these values)

How to configure

Firstly you need to sign up on elastic website. After it you should create a deployment.

Then enter in newly created deployment and launch all the services that you need.
For our purposes we need only pack of 3 minimal resources: Elasticsearch, Kibana, and APM. 

Your interface should look like the image below:

 I.e. : Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM. Make sure that status each of them is ‘green’ and you don’t see any errors. If this is not the case, the easiest option is to contact Elastic Support or to try to restart the services. In the limit, reinstall these components in your cloud.

Then, go to the security page and click on “Reset Password” button.

Copy your password. Get back to the main page with services. Now you can launch each of them. 

Access to Kibana, with the password that you've just reset and copied and the username "elastic".
In Kibana you will need to add support of your APM agent in the cloud, and for that just click "Add APM".

After clicking on “Add APM” and follow the instructions. Then click on RUM tab and copy your own APM serverUrl.
Click on “Launch APM”: