APM APIs

APM Server vs managed inputs

In Elastic Cloud Hosted, the APM Server receives data from Elastic APM agents and transforms it into Elasticsearch documents. In Elastic Cloud Serverless there is in fact no APM Server running, instead managed inputs receive and transform data.

There are two kinds of APIs related to Elastic APM:


APM UI API	Kibana APIs specific to working with the Applications UI including updating configuration options, uploading real user monitoring (RUM) source maps, adding annotations, and more.
APM Server API	APIs for working with APM Server. These are mainly intake APIs that accept data from APM agents and are used primarily by APM agent developers.
Observability Intake Serverless API	Managed inputs expose an API endpoint to query general server information. This lightweight endpoint is useful as a server up/down health check. This API is exclusively for APM agent developers.