Use APM securely
Elastic Stack Serverless
APM Server vs managed intake service
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 the managed intake service receives and transforms data.
When setting up Elastic APM, it’s critical to ensure that application data is secure from start to finish. You should approach securing your application data from different perspectives:
| What kind of data is collected? | Ensure that data doesn’t contain sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, health data, or other identifiable information. Read more in Secure data. |
| How do APM agents and Elastic Agent communicate? | Ensure that any communication between APM agents and Elastic Agent are both encrypted and authenticated. Read more in Secure communication with APM agents. |
| How do APM Server and the Elastic Stack communicate? | Use role-based access control to grant APM Server users access to secured resources. The roles that you set up depend on your organization’s security requirements and the minimum privileges required to use specific features. Read more in Secure communication with the Elastic Stack. |
| Who can use the Applications UI? | Use role-based access control to grant users access to features of the Applications UI. Read more in Secure access to the Applications UI. |