---
title: Infrastructure
description: The Infrastructure tab provides information about the containers, pods, and hosts that the selected service is linked to. The data sources and navigation...
url: https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3028/solutions/observability/apm/infrastructure
products:
  - APM
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless
  - Elastic Observability
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Beta
  - Elastic Stack: Beta
---

# Infrastructure
The **Infrastructure** tab provides information about the containers, pods, and hosts that the selected service is linked to. The data sources and navigation behavior depend on whether the service is instrumented with [Elastic APM](#observability-apm-infrastructure-elastic-apm) or [OpenTelemetry (OTel)](#observability-apm-infrastructure-otel).
IT ops and software reliability engineers (SREs) can use this tab to quickly find a service’s underlying infrastructure resources when debugging a problem. Knowing what infrastructure is related to a service allows you to remediate issues by restarting, killing hanging instances, changing configuration, rolling back deployments, scaling up, scaling out, and so on.
<tip>
  **Why is the infrastructure tab empty?**If there is no data in the Application UI’s infrastructure tab for a selected service, you can read more about why this happens and how to fix it in the [troubleshooting docs](/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3028/troubleshoot/observability/apm/common-problems#troubleshooting-apm-infra-data).
</tip>


## Elastic APM-instrumented services

For services instrumented with Elastic APM, the tab uses the following data sources:
- **Pods**: Uses the `kubernetes.pod.name` from the [APM metrics data streams](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3028/solutions/observability/apm/metrics).
- **Containers**: Uses the `container.id` from the [APM metrics data streams](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3028/solutions/observability/apm/metrics).
- **Hosts**: If the application is containerized—if the APM metrics documents include `container.id`—the `host.name` is used from the infrastructure data streams (filtered by `container.id`). If not, `host.hostname` is used from the APM metrics data streams.

![Example view of the Infrastructure tab in the Applications UI](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3028/solutions/images/serverless-infra.png)


## OTel-instrumented services

<applies-to>
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available
  - Elastic Stack: Planned
</applies-to>

For services instrumented with OpenTelemetry, the tab exclusively shows OTel-observed infrastructure. Click-through destinations differ by resource type:
- **Hosts**: Links to the [**Hosts**](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3028/solutions/observability/infra-and-hosts/analyze-compare-hosts) UI, which supports OpenTelemetry and its semantic conventions.
- **Containers** and **Pods**: Link to [**Metrics** in Discover](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3028/solutions/observability/infra-and-hosts/discover-metrics), as the Containers and Pods UIs do not yet support OTel semantic conventions.