APM Event Intake: All errors are considered exceptions.

[zikphil]

APM Server version: Fleet APM Server 8.13.2

Description of the problem including expected versus actual behavior:
Looking at the documentations online it seems that the intake endpoint of APM-server for type: errors also serves the purpose of logging standard messages. It seems that the condition is wheter there is an exception object in the event vs a log object.

This is further confirmed on Kibana looking at index templates / component templates, there seems to be both:

• logs-apm.app.*-*
• logs-apm.error-*

However no matter how I format my error event (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/observability/8.13/apm-api-error.html) it seems that all my messages (log or exceptions) are ending up in the -apm.error data_stream. I've tried using the elasticapm python package and the rum-js-core package for sending the events.

Is this expected to be a future feature or should this be working today?

Steps to reproduce:

1. Send an error event on the APM Server Intake Endpoint without including an exception object, only including a log object.
2. Go in Kibana > APM > ACME Service > Errors
3. You will see your non-error logs there and if you further inspect the error object, you will see the datatype is logs-apm.error.

[axw]

errors also serves the purpose of logging standard messages

The intention here is only to support log records that represent an exception. They are expected to end up in logs-apm.error-*.

It sounds like you want to send logs to APM Server, and have them end up in logs-apm.app.*-*? The best option for this is to use OpenTelemetry. APM Server ingests the OpenTelemetry logs signal via OTLP (see https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/observability/current/apm-open-telemetry-direct.html), however please bear in mind that this is in technical preview.

I'll close this since this is working as designed. Please open a topic at https://discuss.elastic.co/c/observability/82 if you have any follow up questions.