Introduction to the Application Performance Management and Analytics Service-阿里云帮助中心

Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch Application Performance Management (APM) is a one-click, cloud-hosted performance monitoring service for instances. Built on the open source Elastic Stack, it uses Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch for data storage. APM monitors the performance of thousands of applications in real time and uses an agent to collect detailed performance information, such as requests, database queries, external HTTP requests, faults, and exceptions. APM also provides visual analytics through Kibana for efficient application performance optimization and monitoring.

Features

The Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch Application Performance Management service includes the following components. 功能模块

Component	Description
APM Agent for application performance data collection	You can collect data using the default agent and data collection templates or using open source libraries written in the same language as your service. The agent program works with your application to collect performance metrics and faults, and then sends the collected data to the server.
APM Server instance for application performance data processing	Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch provides one-click, cloud-hosted APM Server instances. You can quickly create, flexibly scale, and configure APM Server instances as needed. The server instance accepts data from agents through a JSON HTTP API, builds Elasticsearch documents, and stores them in an Elasticsearch cluster. A single server node can typically process data from hundreds of APM Agents.
Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch	You can associate your server node with an existing Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch instance for performance metric data storage and analysis. If you do not have an instance, you can create one. When combined with the proprietary Indexing Service of the Advanced Edition and the mass storage OpenStore, Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch provides high-concurrency write capabilities. This lets you store and search large amounts of data at a low cost and in near real time.
Kibana APM UI	The free, hosted Kibana node provides rich data analytics and visualization for application performance.

Product features

Feature	Description
Fast deployment	Deploy APM Server instances with one click using ACK. Instance creation or configuration changes take effect quickly. Create an APM Server instance in as little as 3 minutes.
Flexible scaling and management	Flexibly change APM Server instance specifications and scale the number of nodes to meet various data processing requirements.
Low cost and high performance	When combined with the Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch Advanced Edition service, it supports high-concurrency writes for massive amounts of application performance data. It also provides low-cost mass storage. This enables visual monitoring of application performance data.

Feature comparison

The following table compares the features of Alibaba Cloud-managed Elastic APM and Apache SkyWalking, a popular open source APM system.

Comparison item	Elastic APM	SkyWalking
Supported languages	Java .NET NodeJS Python Ruby Javascript Go	Java .NET Core NodeJS PHP Go
Supports tracing?	Yes	No
Supported storage	Elasticsearch	Elasticsearch, H2, and MySQL
UI richness	High. Compared to SkyWalking, Elastic APM lets you perform complex queries and filtering in the UI.	High. Compared to Elastic APM, SkyWalking can provide a topology graph between services.
Agent usability (code intrusiveness)	For some open source libraries in Java, .NET Core, and NodeJS, automatic instrumentation requires no code changes. For some open source libraries in Python, Ruby, Javascript, and Go, an SDK is provided for manual instrumentation. For unsupported libraries or frameworks, you can also collect agent data through the Public API.	For some open source libraries in Java, .NET Core, and NodeJS, automatic instrumentation requires no code changes. Unsupported libraries cannot be used. For Go and PHP, an SDK is provided for manual instrumentation.
Query capability	Query or filter any APM information in the Kibana APM UI.	Only supports querying by TraceId and Endpoint name.
Alerting	Supported	Supported
JVM monitoring	Supported	Supported
Go Runtime monitoring	Supported	Not supported
Collects faults and exceptions	Supported	Not supported
Full observability	Supported. Elastic Stack already provides a complete solution for log and metric monitoring. When combined with APM, you can build a comprehensive observability system.	Not supported

In addition, to optimize cost and performance, you can connect the APM Server to the Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch Advanced Edition service. This lets you use the high-performance, pay-by-data-transfer Indexing Service and the mass storage OpenStore, which significantly reduces the cost of data retrieval and storage for APM scenarios.