Activating Application Performance Monitoring (APM) in Kibana and Elasticsearch enhances alerting insights by enabling detailed views of rule execution through distributed tracing. This process involves setting up an APM server, configuring Kibana and Elasticsearch settings, and using a comprehensive waterfall chart to visualize each step of rule execution. The article explains how to monitor specific transactions and identify potential performance bottlenecks without relying on slow logs. Users can create custom dashboards to monitor alert success and failure rates over time, leveraging Kibana's data visualization capabilities. Despite the detailed instructions, the features discussed are not yet available on Elastic Cloud, and users interested in these capabilities are encouraged to contact Elastic Support.