APM Self Instrumentation outputs

Elastic Observability APM
1

Hi I'm trying to figure out if the apm server self instrumentation (here) is able to output it's events to kafka?

2

The self-instrumentation is using the APM Go Agent, which only supports sending to an APM Server. If you point the self-instrumentation at another APM Server, then you can configure that to send to Kafka: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/server/current/kafka-output.html

3

Ok great. So it responds to the go agent environment variables for where to direct the events? I got a little confused because the apm-server config under instrumentation only outputs to elasticsearch.

4

Only some of them will be honoured; the expected way to configure the instrumentation is through apm-server.yml. For example, ELASTIC_APM_SERVER_URLS will be ignored; you must set apm-server.instrumentation.hosts in the config file.

There's no output to Elasticsearch under apm-server.instrumentation, only configuration to specify external APM Server hosts. Maybe you're confusing that with Elasticsearch, since they have similar ports? (8200 vs. 9200)