Elastic APM Java Agent : Agent Id

Elastic Observability APM
1

Hi Team,

I was going through the metadata provided by Elastic APM and came across the key agent.ephemeral_id.
Can someone please help me understand its purpose and how does the value serve the purpose in observability.

I have a microservice based application in which all the microservices are using the same elastic APM jar with same service.name.
I wanted to understand how does the jar uniquely identify the every service in this case.

Best Regards,
Namita

2

Hi @Namita_Jaokar ,

I am not certain about the usage of this field in the UI, but I can tell you about what features it can be used for:

The agent.ephemeral_id is a random ID that is generated when the agent starts, it allows to distinguish multiple JVMs having the same service.name and service.version.

Trying to use the process.pid for the same usage would lead to issues as it it quite common to have process.pid = 1 in containers for example.