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shruthiarjun
Participant

Introduction


If you are an organization who has even a single API running in production or getting ready for it, you will be keen on getting insights on the API’s availability, response time, traffic trends, consumption patterns etc. to ensure that the business goals of the API are met. For API developers and DevOps engineers, monitoring the health of the API is critical to identify bottlenecks and to take remedial action in order to meet the Service Level Agreements. Similarly, for Business owners and API Product Managers knowing who is using their API, what is the traffic it is attracting, which platforms are generating more traffic and other usage related understanding becomes important to provide positive customer experience and measure the success of their API Program.

API Analytics Dashboard embedded in the API Portal is the place where one could unearth such information to get end-to-end visibility of your APIs and their ecosystem. API Portal has always had an Analytics dashboard, which we have now strengthened with more ready-to-use reports and renovated for better user experience. In this blog, I list down the highlights of the new dashboard.

NOTE: This new Analytics dashboard is available to you if you are running API Management on CF (AWS) infrastructure. To learn how to enable API Management on AWS, please see this blog.

Overview


In this tab, you will get a quick summary of how the APIs have been faring in the last 7 days. This tab is most useful if you are an executive or a business owner who wants high level information of the API performance and consumption. It has KPI information focusing on key metrics like Total Traffic, Average Response Time, Total Errors etc. It has reports that tell you the overall Traffic trends, API call distribution across different response codes, APIs and Products drawing the most traffic, Developers and their Applications drawing the most traffic, Backends that are drawing the most traffic, APIs that are running the slowest and many more. These reports help you identify the most popular APIs and also the most problematic APIs.

Samples from the Overview page :



 



 



Health


In this tab, the reports give in-dept information on API performance and errors for the last 7 days. This tab is most useful if you are an API DevOps engineer who wants to monitor and maintain the health of the APIs and strive to keep up the promised SLAs. It has reports that tell you how many APIs are erroring out and where they are erroring out (whether it is the backend or the API layer). It also has reports to understand the cache usage and the effect of cache usage on the API Response time.

Since you may want to single out certain problematic APIs or backends and perform remedial action, this tab allows you to adjust the time range and the interval for the reports. You could select one or more specific days or focus on specific hours. You can also apply filters to see the reports for specific APIs/Products/Developers/Applications.

Samples from the Health page :



 



 


Usage


In this tab, the reports give detailed information on the consumption pattern of the APIs for the last 3 months. This tab is most useful if you are an API Product Manager looking to provide the best possible customer experience. It has reports to tell you who are your most recent developers and what are the most recent applications. It also has reports sharing insights on the most used device types, browsers, Operating systems etc. that can influence the way APIs need to be designed. You can think of new business or revenue opportunities based on usage patterns for APIs. You can engage with the Developer ecosystem better after learning about the applications they are bringing in and the traffic they are generating.

Like in the Health tab, you can adjust the time range and the interval for the reports to focus on certain months or weeks or days. You can also apply filters to see the reports for specific APIs/Products/Developers/Applications.

Samples from the Usage page :



 



 



 

Custom Views & Custom charts


In case you have a specific report to be generated that is not readily available in the above-mentioned tabs, you have the capability to create a custom view (upto 3) and bring in your own charts! When creating such custom charts, you can choose from a list of standard measures and dimensions. You can even choose multiple measures and dimensions to have the ability to drill down into your reports. Once built, you have the ability to modify or delete such charts as well. In case you want to keep your view very focused and clutter free, you can hide the insignificant charts and bring them back only when required from the library.

In all the custom views, you can adjust the time range and interval. You can get analytics data for the last 6 months. You can also apply filters to see the reports for specific APIs/Products/Developers/Applications.



 



 



 

Summary


API Analytics is very critical for running an API Program smoothly. Hopefully with the new enhancements detailed in this blog, we help you in this journey. We plan to add more such ready-to-use reports in the coming months and bring additional capabilities that make API monitoring and reporting easy for you.

You can check our official help page for more details.

Let us know what you think about this latest offering!
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