Central Config of APM agents in Kibana

[tarund (Tarun)]

Hi Team, I have multiple java agents running for several applications on different servers. Currently, the config is specified in properties file. I want to be able to update some of the dynamic configs from Kibana for specific service name agents. In Kibana APM App, I only see 2 properties "transaction max spans" & "transaction sample rate" for some agents, while for other agents I can see ~8 additional properties. Not getting the "server_urls" property in any of them.

1. Can we update the "server_urls" property from Kibana or remotely through some other way
2. How do I get to see all properties for all agents in Kibana ?

Kibana version: 7.15.2

Elasticsearch version: 7.15.2

APM Server version: 7.15.0

APM Agent language and version: Java 1.18.1

[Jonas_Kunz]

Hi @tarund ,

The config-options you see in the Kibana UI are the only ones currently supported for central configuration. Which specific options would you like to see there for the Java agent?

Regarding the configuration of server_urls:
This is kind of a chicken-egg problem: When the java agent starts, it needs to know the server_urls property, because this URL will be used for fetching the configuration updates.
If we would allow the update of the server_urls property via the central config, the agent would loose this update after a restart and would be stuck with the initially configured server_urls property.

However, the server_urls property is dynamic, meaning that it can be changed at runtime, for example by updating elasticapm.properties. You could for example achieve what you desire by centrally managing the roleout of elasticapm.properties to your machines outside of elastic.