Performance impact of installing APM (Java and .NET)

[mikesparr]

Elastic Cloud on latest 7.3.x release and working with Ops to get APM agents installed in production. We have some questions we want to cover before flipping the switch regarding resource usage and performance impact of APM.

Similar to: APM Time Complexity Questions

Support case: #00389518

Questions:

1. For the Java and .NET agents, what is the memory overhead of adding APM (i.e. a VM running Tomcat has 2 CPU, 3GB RAM) - how much will the agent consume if added?

2. If for some reason Elastic Cloud is down, will APM agents buffer metrics in memory until cloud back up to push to Elasticsearch?

3. If APM agents do buffer metrics before shipping to Elasticsearch, how much memory will they consume or is there a cutoff?

4. On average what is the network impact or throughput for APM metrics being shipped to Elastic Cloud? (payload side and number of requests per page or servlet/endpoint interaction)

Anything else you can think of that would appease Operations team inquiries and get comfortable about installing APM in production is appreciated.

[felixbarny (Felix Barnsteiner)]

Hi and thanks for your questions.
For the Java agent, most of them should be covered here:
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/java/current/faq.html
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/java/current/tuning-and-overhead.html

[Sergey_Kleyman]

Hi,

You can find .NET agent performance tuning related information at https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/dotnet/current/performance-tuning.html

[karlpokus]

Are there any benchmarking for the nodejs agent besides https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/nodejs/current/performance-tuning.html?

[mikesparr]

Thanks all for your feedback. I think we have all we need so feel free to close!