Thanks, @axw - that clarifies my question!
We'll explore moving our APM server closer to our agents as you've recommended - that does make sense.
On a slightly different note, what's your recommendation on which Elasticsearch node types should APM server output to - dedicated ingest or directly to the data nodes? (we already have dedicated ingest nodes which our Beats are using, we're just not sure if there's added benefit of one over the other).
Thanks,
Luis