How to auto-instrument your applications
Tags: instrumentation, observability, elasticsearch, devops
Published: 2024-01-02 12:24:20

In the world of application monitoring and observability, one of the key challenges is gaining insight into the performance and behavior of your applications without the need for extensive manual instrumentation. This is where auto-instrumentation comes into play, simplifying the process of monitoring and tracing your codebase. In this article, we'll explore the concept of auto-instrumentation and dive into how the `elastic-apm-node` package can help auto-instrument a Node.js server.

## What is Auto-Instrumentation?

Auto-instrumentation is a technique that allows you to automatically collect performance data, traces, and metrics from your application without manually adding code to every function or method. It involves the automatic injection of monitoring code or agents into your application at runtime, removing the need for developers to add monitoring hooks manually.

The benefits of auto-instrumentation are clear:

- Efficiency: Developers can focus on writing code rather than adding monitoring code snippets throughout the application.
- Comprehensive Insights: Auto-instrumentation can capture data from various layers of your application stack.
- Reduced Human Error: Manual instrumentation can lead to errors and omissions, which auto-instrumentation helps avoid.

## Elastic APM Server and elastic-apm-node

Elastic APM (Application Performance Monitoring) is a popular tool for monitoring and observability in modern applications. It provides end-to-end visibility into the performance of your applications, from the front end to the back end. Elastic APM supports various programming languages, including Node.js.

In Node.js applications, you can easily enable auto-instrumentation using the elastic-apm-node package. Let's see how to get started.

```bash
npm install elastic-apm-node --save
```

After you install `elastic-apm-node`, add this line in your Node.js application entrypoint.

```js
import 'elastic-apm-node/start'
```

## What modules are auto-instrumented?

Most popular packages are auto-instrumented, and you can take a look on all supported modules [here](https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-nodejs/tree/main/lib/instrumentation/modules)

## What to do if something is not auto-instrumented?

If some module/package is not auto-instrumented, you can contribute to [elastic/apm-agent-nodejs](https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-nodejs), or fallback to manual instrumentation to attend your use cases

## Conclusion

Auto-instrumentation is a powerful approach to gain insights into your application's performance with minimal manual effort. Using tools like `elastic-apm-node` lets you quickly enable auto-instrumentation in your Node.js applications, allowing you to focus on building features rather than instrumenting code for monitoring.

If you're looking to streamline your application monitoring and observability, give auto-instrumentation with elastic-apm-node a try. Your users will thank you for delivering faster, more reliable applications.

Happy monitoring!

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