In this practical demo we'll show how to log extra custom messages for transactions traced by Elastic APM, and how to easily view the resulting logs in Kibana.

Application Performance Monitoring is a fantastic tool that goes beyond simple logging and metrics collection to provide an x-ray of what's really going on in a production app. It requires very little configuration to get started and is designed to show a lot of useful information in an intuitive way. One side effect is that there isn't a lot of flexibility for showing custom messages in the APM UI. Sometimes we want to know a lot more about a transaction which is being sluggish and holding back our app. Fortunately there is a way to do this - we can output extra lines in the app's logs. If those are collected and sent to the same Elasticsearch instance as the code traces, we'll have an opportunity to view the extra detail from the APM UI. Come and find out about this simple but powerful addition to your observability toolkit!