In terms of what could be improved, Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low. Their JVM metrics are much less while running on CPU memory and on top of that you get a thread usage. They're not giving much on application performance metrics. In that respect, they have to improve a little bit. If you compare that with other tools, such as New Relic, which is also not giving many insights, it would be good to get internal calls or to see backend calls. We are not getting this kind of metric.

On the other hand, if you go to the trace view, it gives you a good backend calls view. That backend call view is also capturing everything, and we need some kind of control over it, which it does not have. For example, if I don't want some of the sequence selected, there should be controls for that. Moreover you need to do all these things manually. Nowadays, just imagine any product opted to do conservation manually, that would be really disastrous. We don't want to do that manually. For now this needs to be either by API or some kind of automated procedure. If you want to install the APM Agent, because it is manual we would need to tune it so that the APIs are available for the APM site. That's one drawback.

Additionally, the synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring services are not available here. Whereas in New Relic the user does get such services.

The third drawback I see is the control site. For now, only one role is defined for this APM. So if I want to restrict the user domain, for example, if in your organization you have two or three domains, domain A, domain B, domain C, but you want to give access to the specific domain or a specific application, I am not sure how to do that here.

Both the synthetic and process monitoring should be improved. For the JVM, Java Process Monitoring, and any process monitoring, they have to have more metrics and a breakdown of the TCP/IP, and the tools are giving me - they don't provide many metrics in size. You get everything, but you fail to visualize it. The New Relic only focuses on transactions, and Elastic APM also focuses on similar stuff, but I am still looking for other options like thread usage, backend calls, front end calls, or how many front end and backend calls. This kind of metric is definitely required.

We don't have much control. For example, some backend calls trigger thousands of prepared statements, update statements, or select statements, and we don't have any control. If I only want select statement, not update statements, this kind of control should be there and properly supplied. The property file is very big and it is still manual, so if you want control agent properties you need UI control or API control. Nowadays, the world is looking for the API site so they'll be able to develop more smartly. They are looking for these kinds of options to enrich their dashboard creation and management.

Our licensing model isn't a full one. We are in a less interesting model, so we do not have intelligence on it. We don't get system intelligence and machine learning models, however, I don't know if it is relevant to what we use the solution for. 

We don't have the platinum version. We are on the gold version. Our system intelligence and machine learning, and the other things regarding the competencies of everything, we have to build ourselves. It's not easy, as we are in West Africa and sometimes we do not have the relevant competencies. It takes time to get the skills we need to use the solution effectively.

The solution would be better if it was capable of more automation, especially in a monitoring capacity or for the response to abnormalities.

There needs to be less boiler code. That's where I see a solution such as Dynatrace as being very good. We need to just deploy the Dynatrace and then it just uses all the TCP packages et cetera, to figure out what the endpoint to endpoint mapping is. It can give more insight into performance.

I can see mistakes in annotations. If a developer uses a different annotation, these performance metrics are not in the portal. When I go to the portal, I do not see many insights on the endpoints or where there could be latencies. I'd like overall fewer mistakes.

The solution needs to use more AI. Once the product onboards AI, users would more effectively be able to track endpoints for specific messages.

In the future, Elastic APM needs a portfolio iTool. They can provide an easy way to develop the custom UI for Kibana.

Elastic APM needs to focus on improving infrastructure, monitoring, and enriching Kibana features.

The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome.