apm

Application-Performance Monitoring for APIBuilder4Elastic

With Elastic-APM, you can monitor the APIBuilder4Elastic better than just using logs directly from the API Builder. Of course, you can also add other API-Builder services or other applications.

Once APM is set up, you can use Kibana --> Observability --> APM to access a series of application performance dashboards. You will find details about throughput, resource consumption, etc. Here are some sample screenshots.

APM Services overview

Selected APIBuilder4Elastic - Overview

Selected APIBuilder4Elastic - Dependencies

Selected APIBuilder4Elastic - Errors

Selected APIBuilder4Elastic - Metrics

Setup

The solution, respectively the APIBuilder4Elastic, is prepared to use an external APM-Server or to deploy directly with the solution. You can enable the APM-Service via Docker Compose in your .env file or in the Helm chart.

The activation is divided into 2 steps. The setup and start of the APM server and the connection to the APIBuilder4Elastic. Step 1 is of course not necessary if you use an existing external APM server.

Docker-Compose

1. Start the APM-Server

This launches the APM service as a Docker container. The configured Elasticsearch hosts (ELASTICSEARCH_HOSTS) and certificates are used to connect to Elasticsearch. If you want to have user login enabled, you also need to set the APM_USERNAME and APM_PASSWORD parameters. Please make sure that the initial setup user must have rights to create templates (e.g. the elastic user).

docker-compose -f apm/docker-compose.apm-server.yml up -d

This starts the APM service as a Docker container:

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                                  COMMAND                  CREATED        STATUS                  PORTS                                            NAMES
cdffd8117b8b   docker.elastic.co/apm/apm-server:7.15.2                "/usr/local/scripts/…"   16 hours ago   Up 16 hours             0.0.0.0:8200->8200/tcp                           apm-server

To make use of the APM-Service in APIBuilder4Elastic, you need to set the parameter APM_ENABLED=true. This will cause the API-Builder process to attempt to connect to the configured APM-Server. During start, at the very beginning, the following will be logged:

2. Activate APM-Service in APIBuilder4Elastic

Application performance monitoring enabled. Using APM-Server: https://axway-elk-apm-server:8200

If no APM service is specified, then the following default is used: https://apm-server:8200. However, you can configure it yourself using the parameter: APM_SERVER. For further parameters please refer to the env-sample.

Helm

If you are deploying the solution with Helm, please proceed as follows.

1. Start the APM-Server

In your local-values.yml you activate the APM server by means of. Additionally, please set the Elasticsearch cluster UUID to include the APM server in stack monitoring:

apm-server:
  enabled: true
  elasticsearchClusterUUID: 3hxrsNg6QXq2wSkVWGTD4A

2. Activate APM-Service in APIBuilder4Elastic

Now you can further configure APIBuilder4Elastic with the following parameters.

apibuilder4elastic:
  apmserver:
   # If you want to use an external APM-Server, you can configure the URL here. 
   # Defaults to the internal APM-Server service if enabled
   serverUrl: {}
   # The Certificate-Authory to validate the APM-Server certificate
   # serverCaCertFile: "config/certificates/my-apmserver-ca.crt"
   # You may disable the certificate check
   # verifyServerCert: "false"