elastic-apm-node

What is elastic-apm-node?

The elastic-apm-node package is an official Elastic APM (Application Performance Monitoring) agent for Node.js applications. It allows you to monitor the performance of your Node.js applications by collecting metrics, tracing requests, and capturing errors. This helps in identifying performance bottlenecks and understanding the behavior of your application in production.

What are elastic-apm-node's main functionalities?

Transaction Tracing

This feature allows you to trace transactions in your application. You can start and end transactions to measure the time taken for specific operations.

const apm = require('elastic-apm-node').start({
  serviceName: 'my-service',
  serverUrl: 'http://localhost:8200'
});

// Start a transaction
const transaction = apm.startTransaction('myTransaction');

// Do some work
setTimeout(() => {
  // End the transaction
  transaction.end();
}, 1000);

Error Capturing

This feature allows you to capture and report errors that occur in your application. The captured errors are sent to the APM server for analysis.

const apm = require('elastic-apm-node').start({
  serviceName: 'my-service',
  serverUrl: 'http://localhost:8200'
});

try {
  throw new Error('Something went wrong');
} catch (error) {
  apm.captureError(error);
}

Custom Spans

This feature allows you to create custom spans within a transaction to measure the time taken for specific blocks of code. This helps in identifying performance bottlenecks within a transaction.

const apm = require('elastic-apm-node').start({
  serviceName: 'my-service',
  serverUrl: 'http://localhost:8200'
});

const transaction = apm.startTransaction('myTransaction');
const span = transaction.startSpan('myCustomSpan');

// Do some work
setTimeout(() => {
  span.end();
  transaction.end();
}, 1000);

Other packages similar to elastic-apm-node

newrelic

The newrelic package is an APM agent for Node.js applications provided by New Relic. It offers similar functionalities such as transaction tracing, error capturing, and custom instrumentation. New Relic provides a comprehensive monitoring solution with a rich set of features and integrations.

appdynamics

The appdynamics package is an APM agent for Node.js applications provided by AppDynamics. It offers features like transaction tracing, error capturing, and custom metrics. AppDynamics is known for its advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities to provide deep insights into application performance.

README

Elastic APM Node.js Agent (Alpha)

Warning: This project is currently in alpha. Use it at your own risk.

This is the official Node.js agent for Elastic APM. Read our announcement blog post for details.

If you are trying out APM and have feedback or problems, please post them on the Discuss forum.

Quick start

1. To run Elastic APM for your own applications make sure you have the prerequisites in place first. For details see Getting Started with Elastic APM

2. Now follow the documentation links below relevant to your framework or stack to get set up

Documentation

• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Get started with Express
• Get started with hapi
• Get started with Koa
• Get started with a custom Node.js stack
• Advanced Setup and Configuration
• API Reference
• Custom Transactions
• Custom Traces
• Source Map Support
• Compatibility Overview
• Troubleshooting

Development Notes

To ease development, set the environment variable DEBUG_PAYLOAD=1 to have the agent dump the JSON payload sent to the APM Server to a temporary file on your local harddrive.

Testing

The test suite expects the databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis to be present. The npm test command will try and start them all automatically before running the tests. This should work on OS X if the databases are all installed using Homebrew.

To run the linter without running any tests, run npm run lint. To automatically fix linting errors run npm run lint-fix.

Using Docker for Testing

Running the testsuite on Jenkins is based on docker images. You can also make use of this setup when running tests locally. Scripts are provided for different stages of testing: testing the documentation, running tests against different Node.js versions and running tests against different versions of dependencies. The scripts are tested with a minimum docker version of 17.06.2-ce. For a full overview of the supported test matrix have a look at Jenkins Configuration.

Testing Documentation

./test/script/docker/run_docs.sh

Testing against Node.js versions

./test/script/docker/run_tests.sh nodejs-version

E.g. ./test/script/docker/run_tests.sh 8

Testing Dependencies

./test/script/docker/run_tests.sh nodejs-version dependencies

E.g. ./test/script/docker/run_tests.sh 8 redis,pg

Cleanup Docker Container and Volumes

./test/script/docker/cleanup.sh

License

BSD-2-Clause

Made with ♥️ and ☕️ by Elastic and our community.