APM Agent 9.x with Logstash

Introduction

We will set up Logstash as our Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Logging server. We have used Logstash before, so for a more indepth tutorial on Logstash, see here.

Download Code: Available on Github

Requirements

We use two different linux server:

• APM logging server: ubuntu 24.04, 1gb memory
• App server: ubuntu 24.04, 1gb memory

Steps

Step 1 - Update Ubuntu

The Ubuntu installations are brand new. We update the distribution as well as install some tools we typically use on both machines.

apt-get update && apt dist-upgrade -y && apt-get install -y vim curl zip jq gnupg gpg gcc git

Step 2 - Install Logstash

The Ubuntu installations needs these dependencies, so run these commands on both:

wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/elasticsearch-keyring.gpg echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/elasticsearch-keyring.gpg] https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/9.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-9.x.list apt-get update; apt-get install -y apt-transport-https; apt-get install -y logstash;

Step 3 - Start Logstash Service for APM Data

cat > /etc/logstash/conf.d/apm.conf <<'EOL'
input {
  elastic_agent {
    port => 5044
  }
}

output {
 file {
   path => '/var/log/logstash/apm.txt'
 }
}
EOL
systemctl enable logstash
systemctl start logstash

Step 4 - Install APM Agent

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/apm-server/apm-server-9.1.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf apm-server-9.1.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
cat > ~/apm-server-9.1.4-linux-x86_64/apm-server.yml <<'EOL'
apm-server:
  host: '0.0.0.0:8200'
  auth:
    secret_token: 'abcd1234'
output.logstash:
  enabled: true
  hosts: ['ip.of.apm-logging.server:5044']
  ssl.enabled: false
logging.level: error
EOL
chown -R root:root ~/apm-server-9.1.4-linux-x86_64

For the apm-server.host, the 0.0.0.0 is very permissive. Consider using the actual ip address of the server or 127.0.0.1 if it is just localhost.

Step 5 - Start the APM Agent

You can start the APM agent with this comand:

cd ~/apm-server-9.1.4-linux-x86_64 ./apm-server

If you want to see the operational logs of the APM agent, you can add the -e flag like so:

cd ~/apm-server-9.1.4-linux-x86_64 ./apm-server -e

Step 6 - Install Application

See the Testing Applications of the Beginner's Guide to install and test APM.