Elastic APM API

Elastic APM Intake API — application performance monitoring server that receives traces, spans, transactions, errors, and metrics from APM agents via HTTP intake API, enabling agents to ingest custom telemetry data and query APM data stored in Elasticsearch for performance analysis.

Evaluated Mar 06, 2026 (0d ago) vcurrent

Homepage ↗ Repo ↗ Other elastic apm tracing observability opentelemetry distributed-tracing

⚙ Agent Friendliness

/ 100

Can an agent use this?

🔒 Security

/ 100

Is it safe for agents?

⚡ Reliability

/ 100

Does it work consistently?

Score Breakdown

⚙ Agent Friendliness

MCP Quality

Documentation

Error Messages

Auth Simplicity

Rate Limits

🔒 Security

TLS Enforcement

100

Auth Strength

Scope Granularity

Dep. Hygiene

Secret Handling

SOC2 Type II. GDPR compliant with EU data residency. HIPAA BAA available. ISO 27001. TLS enforced. APM secret tokens and Elastic API keys provide reasonable auth. Open-source codebase enables security auditing.

⚡ Reliability

Uptime/SLA

Version Stability

Breaking Changes

Error Recovery

Best When

You're already using the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana) and want integrated APM tracing alongside your existing logs and metrics.

Avoid When

You don't have Elastic Stack — use Datadog APM, Honeycomb, or New Relic for standalone APM without Elasticsearch dependency.

Use Cases

• Agents sending custom traces and transactions to Elastic APM for tracking AI agent operation performance and latency
• Error ingestion — agents reporting application errors and exceptions to Elastic APM for centralized error tracking
• Performance analysis — agents querying Elasticsearch APM indices to identify slow transactions and performance regressions
• Custom instrumentation — agents using APM intake API to instrument non-standard services and track business transactions
• Alert correlation — agents querying Elastic APM metrics to correlate performance degradation with deployment events

Not For

• Infrastructure metrics — use Elastic Metrics or Prometheus for infrastructure/system metrics; APM is for application traces
• Log aggregation — use Elastic Logs or Logstash for log ingestion; APM handles traces and spans
• Teams not using Elastic Stack — APM data lives in Elasticsearch; without existing Elastic deployment, setup cost is high

Interface

REST API

Yes

GraphQL

gRPC

MCP Server

SDK

Yes

Webhooks

OpenAPI Spec ↗

Authentication

Methods: api_key bearer_token

OAuth: No Scopes: No

APM secret token for intake API (configured per APM server). Alternatively, Elastic API keys from Kibana for agent authorization. Self-hosted APM Server can be configured without auth for internal use. Elastic Cloud requires auth.

Pricing

Model: freemium

Free tier: Yes

Requires CC: No

Open-source APM server is free to self-host. Elastic Cloud pricing includes APM as part of the Elastic Stack subscription. Pricing based on ingest volume and cluster size.

Agent Metadata

Pagination

cursor

Idempotent

Retry Guidance

Documented

Known Gotchas

⚠ APM intake API is write-only — agents must use Elasticsearch APIs (not APM API) to query stored trace data
⚠ Spans must be associated with transactions via transaction_id — agents sending orphan spans will have no parent context
⚠ APM server and Elasticsearch version compatibility is strict — mismatched versions cause ingestion failures
⚠ Sampling configuration on APM server controls what fraction of traces are stored — agents should not assume 100% storage
⚠ OpenTelemetry format is preferred for new implementations — native APM intake format is older and less portable

Alternatives

datadog-api new-relic-api honeycomb-api jaeger-api

Full Evaluation Report

Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for Elastic APM API.

$99

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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.