Application and API networks are continuing to grow in complexity.
As modern IT teams are expected to forge tech stacks that contain hundreds – if not thousands – of interconnected applications, defining a comprehensive API Management (APIM) approach can prove an unwieldy challenge. Having a centralized place to deploy, manage, and monitor your API resources is one of the most succinct strategies to address this, which is why APIM is a central tenet of MuleSoft.
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve this experience in order to keep pace with the rapidly expanding and often fluid requirements our customers have for APIM. We also recognize that securing sensitive APIs and taking action to ensure proper governance is a core component of their ongoing effort, as the scale of growth can result in vulnerabilities slipping through the cracks without proper oversight. With this in mind, we’re happy to announce the release of API Governance Dashboard for Anypoint Platform.
State of the Union: API lifecycle
The API Governance Dashboard is a pre-built, real-time dashboard that provides you with a comprehensive view of your API ecosystem and enables you to take action to improve governance and quality. The Dashboard brings together essential out-of-the-box metrics in a single, intuitive view, allowing your organization to monitor the health and governance status of your API programs and respond to key insights. It now serves as the new landing page for Anypoint API Governance and is available to all MuleSoft organizations at no additional cost.
Not only will you be able to quickly understand your API footprint, but you can also validate which APIs are governed or non-conformant to your policies while keeping tabs on which APIs are public or sensitive, unsecured or unprotected, and even which are missing documentation.
For APIs that are governed in MuleSoft, understand the specifics of their policy conformance and take tactical action in-app based on this context to align your API ecosystem to your wider strategy.
Our goal with the API Governance Dashboard is to provide a unified view of the entire state of your API footprint. By presenting an understanding of exactly which APIs are conformant to their governance strategy, we hope that the challenges involved with rapid scaling and API deployment – as well as making operational decisions to depreciate certain APIs – become more manageable. We want our customers to feel empowered to take proactive action to secure their application networks, and API Governance Dashboard is the first of many innovations we’re releasing toward that effort.
MuleSoft monitoring and observability
The release of the API Governance Dashboard coincides with a broader push here at MuleSoft to codify our approach to monitoring and observability. The term “monitoring” might evoke concepts like incident management and broader system health, but the challenge outlined in this post regarding scaling technology stacks can be considered broadly as a health monitoring problem, too.
We intend to provide a full-fledged collection of observability tools and dashboards that cover end-to-end the integration and API lifecycle, which the API Governance Dashboard and governance console plays a part of. This means insightful analytics across Anypoint from API deployments through to traditional monitoring, incident management, usage and extensibility. We’re investing in offering metrics at every step of the process.
