---
title: APM APIs
description: There are two kinds of APIs related to Elastic APM: 
url: https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/4572/solutions/observability/apm/apis
products:
  - APM
  - Elastic Documentation
  - Elastic Observability
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available
  - Elastic Stack: Generally available
---

# APM APIs
<admonition title="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.
</admonition>

There are two kinds of APIs related to Elastic APM:

|                                                                                                                                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                    |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| [APM UI API](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/4572/solutions/observability/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](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/4572/solutions/observability/apm/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](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/4572/solutions/observability/apm/managed-inputs-apm-intake-event-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. |