Increasingly, organizations are being disrupted by the rapid changes in technology and market dynamics brought about by cloud computing, SaaS applications, mobile adoption and big data applications. To keep pace with these changes, organizations need to rapidly connect their systems and open up their platforms to external applications, vendors and community.
Organizations realize that building an API layer that can serve all of their applications is the fastest way to drive adoption of their platform. As organizations adopt an API-first approach, they increasingly need to understand and track their API usage and performance metrics. Within Anypoint Platform, this can easily be done with API provider analytics.
But, as the application network expands, the consumers of the API and the developer community using the APIs also need to understand their own API usage and performance metrics. To enable API consumers to access this information, we are excited to introduce new capabilities around API consumer analytics.
Surfacing Insights on the Developer Portal
Within Anypoint Platform, developers register their application on the API Portal. To establish a contract between the application and the API being invoked by the application, the developer needs to request access for their application from the portal. The API manager then prompts the developer to provide key information about the application such as the Name, Description, Application URL, and Redirect URI. When the access request is approved, the contract between the application and the API version is established. Developers can then use their application to call the APIs. They can also view the API metrics associated with calls originating from their application by navigating to their application in My Applications tab in the portal.
In this view, you can view and edit the application information that you entered while requesting API access along with the Client ID and secret used to access the API, the SLA tier and the approval status for the contract. To view the API metrics, you need to click on the API row and a detail pane opens to the right side of the screen. Today, you can view three different API metrics – Requests, Performance, and Success and Blocked call metrics.
The API metrics include the number of requests made for an API, the average latency to service a request, and blocked and successful call metrics.
Monitor SLAs, Track Performance, Troubleshoot and Monetize APIs
With API Consumer Analytics, developers and application owners have the ability to view the API metrics pertaining to the API calls made by their application. This enables developers and application owners to compare the API metrics to the Service Level Access agreements (SLA) tiers and take actions to proactively manage their applications.
Developers and application owners can determine immediately if the API response times are affecting their application responsiveness and if so, can proactively reach out to API provider to improve their API responsiveness.
Developers can also determine in real time which APIs are called how often and troubleshoot issues arising due to API errors. They can view the successful and blocked call APIs trends over multiple time periods to identify if those API errors are one-off occurrences or more recurrent, indicating underlying systemic issues.
Additionally, to enable API monetization, organizations can provide a real-time view into the API performance and usage metrics to their developer community and partners consuming those APIs. With API Consumer Analytics, developers and application owners are empowered to view these metrics and more actively manage their applications.
Please share with us how you are using analytics to drive growth and engagement among your internal and external developer communities. We are eager to hear your feedback and take your inputs to help you further increase API adoption within your organization. We are listening!
