The embedded Elasticsearch in Hawkular APM is fine for development purposes, but in the real world, you'd want to run it on its own server/pod, so that you can scale it up/down at will, without touching Hawkular APM. Similarly, you may want to scale up/down Hawkular APM without increasing the number of nodes for your Elasticsearch environment.

It does work with an out-of-the-box Elasticsearch. Although it works fine for development purposes, you'd probably want to have an external one for production, though. Which is the point of having it separate on the OpenShift template you mentioned earlier.