Reduce the number of elasticsearch indicies that my Django app creates with elastic-apm for Python

[Jonasks (Jonas Svensson)]

I'd like to reduce the amount of indicies that the APM built in to our Django creates, or setting a custom index pattern. I haven't been able to find any setting to do that, and I've not been successful to send the logs to my Logstash server. I'm using the elastic-apm python module, with minimal settings.
Any suggestions?

Kibana version:
7.0.0
Elasticsearch version:
7.0.0
APM Server version:
7.0.0
APM Agent language and version:
elastic-apm with Django 2.1.10. Python 3.7.

Original install method (e.g. download page, yum, deb, from source, etc.) and version:
Elastic Cloud Enterprise

[axw (Andrew Wilkins)]

Hi Jonas, welcome to the forum!

You can configure the index name(s) in the APM Server: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/server/7.0/elasticsearch-output.html#index-option-es.

What's the reason for reducing the number of indices? Is it because they are sparse, and you want to optimise the index/shard size? If that's the case, you may also be interested in ILM (Index Lifecycle Management) - support for this was added to the APM Server in 7.2: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/server/current/ilm.html

[Jonasks (Jonas Svensson)]

Thanks, and thanks for the quick reply!

We'll bump the APM server to 7.2 and check that out today. The indicies are sparse and we want to optimise a little, as you said.