Elastic APM
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools
Monitoring software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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$99 per month
Free TrialFree version
Small
Medium
Large
- Retail and wholesale
- Transportation and logistics
- Real estate and property management
What is Elastic APM
Elastic APM is an application performance monitoring product that collects distributed traces, application metrics, and errors from instrumented services and applications. It is used by developers, SREs, and platform teams to troubleshoot latency, failures, and service dependencies across microservices and cloud environments. Elastic APM integrates with the Elastic Stack for storage, search, dashboards, and alerting, and it supports multiple language agents and OpenTelemetry-based ingestion paths.
Tight Elastic Stack integration
Elastic APM stores and analyzes APM data in Elasticsearch and uses Kibana for visualization, alerting, and investigation workflows. This enables correlation of traces with logs and infrastructure metrics when those data sources are also ingested into the same stack. Teams that already operate Elasticsearch/Kibana can consolidate observability data and reuse existing access controls, index lifecycle policies, and dashboards.
Broad instrumentation options
Elastic provides APM agents for multiple programming languages and frameworks, supporting automatic and manual instrumentation patterns. It also supports ingesting trace data via OpenTelemetry, which can reduce vendor lock-in at the instrumentation layer. This flexibility helps teams standardize tracing across heterogeneous services.
Search-first troubleshooting workflow
Because APM data is indexed and searchable, users can pivot from a slow transaction to related spans, errors, and contextual fields using query and filtering capabilities. This can be useful for ad hoc investigations and for building custom views for specific services or business transactions. The approach fits organizations that want to treat observability data as searchable events rather than only pre-defined dashboards.
Operational overhead if self-managed
Running Elastic APM at scale typically requires operating Elasticsearch and Kibana (and related components) with appropriate sizing, retention, and upgrade planning. This can add infrastructure and administration effort compared with fully managed APM offerings. Cost and performance depend heavily on indexing volume, retention policies, and cluster tuning.
APM depth varies by language
Feature parity and auto-instrumentation coverage can differ across supported agents and frameworks. Some environments may require more manual instrumentation to achieve complete traces or to capture custom attributes. Teams should validate agent maturity for their specific runtime and deployment model before standardizing.
Data modeling and governance required
Effective use often depends on consistent service naming, environment tagging, sampling strategy, and field conventions across teams. Without governance, traces and metrics can become difficult to correlate and can increase storage costs. Organizations may need to invest in standards and guardrails to keep observability data usable over time.
Plan & Pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | $99 / month (cloud production configuration: 120GB storage / 2 zones). | Basic Observability & search capabilities; limited support. (Footnote: cloud production configuration basis). |
| Gold | $114 / month (cloud production configuration). | Adds reporting, third‑party alert actions, Watcher, multi‑stack monitoring. |
| Platinum | $131 / month (cloud production configuration). | Adds advanced security, machine learning (anomaly detection), cross‑cluster features, APM correlation and more; 24/7 support available. |
| Enterprise | $184 / month (cloud production configuration). | All Platinum features + advanced enterprise features (searchable snapshots, Elastic Maps Server, Elastic AI Assistant, etc.) and premium support/SLA. |
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go (Elastic Observability Serverless) Free tier/trial: "Try for free" available (serverless trial available via Elastic Cloud). Example costs:
- Logs Essentials (ingest): As low as $0.07 per GB ingested. Retention: As low as $0.017 per GB retained per month. Egress: 50 GB free, then $0.05 per GB transferred per month.
- Observability Complete (ingest includes traces/APM): As low as $0.09 per GB ingested. Retention: As low as $0.019 per GB retained per month. Egress: 50 GB free, then $0.05 per GB transferred per month. Optional add-ons: Synthetic browser test runs ($0.0123 per test run), lightweight test locations ($28.00 per location/month), Elastic Managed LLM token pricing (e.g., $4.50 per million input tokens, $21 per million output tokens). Notes: Serverless prices shown on official site take effect November 1, 2025; serverless pricing is ingest/retention/egress based and billed per GB.
Seller details
Elastic N.V.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
2012
Public
https://www.elastic.co/
https://x.com/elastic
https://www.linkedin.com/company/elastic-co/
