Aplication Performance Monitoring in Elastic Stack Elastic APM is a separate component that takes input from APM agents and puts data to Elasticsearch, guide Elastic APM Agent for .NET is a library that basically runs the apm agent in-process, so there is no need to install it on the host machine. You might argue that nobody does the "installs" nowadays, and everything is built on containers, so we just run on docker docker pull docker . elastic . co / apm / apm - server : 7.0 . 1 or take a Helm chart I would agree, using APM in-process and out-of-process results in a different architecture, with it's pros and cons, which we will talk about in another post. Apm-agent-dotnet writes data to APM Server, and not into Elasticsearch directly. Apm-agent-dotnet uses two mechanisms to provide automatic instrumentation: ASP.NET Core middleware and in particular ApmMiddleware DiagnosticSource and in particular AspNetCoreDiagnosticListener, EfCoreDiagnosticListene