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 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; that’s 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 paramount component of their ongoing effort, as the scale of growth can result in vulnerabilities slipping through the cracks without proper oversight.
That’s why we’re happy to announce the upcoming Q3 release for our Anypoint Platform, API Insights.
State of the Union: API lifecycle
API Insights will provide an out-of-the-box dashboard that enables you to improve your API posture through surfacing analytics regarding various aspects of your organization’s API lifecycle.
You’ll be able to quickly understand your API footprint, both within MuleSoft and across different systems like AWS or Azure. Validate which of your APIs are governed or non-conformant to your policies, all while keeping tabs on which APIs are public or sensitive, unsecured or unprotected – and even which ones are missing documentation.
For those APIs which 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 API Insights is to provide a unified view as to 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 the rapid scaling and deployments of new APIs, as well as making operational decisions to depreciate certain others, are much more manageable.
We want our customers to feel empowered to take proactive action to secure their application networks, and API Insights is the first of many such innovations we’re releasing toward that effort.
MuleSoft monitoring and observability
The upcoming release of API Insights 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.
With that in mind, it’s our intention to provide a full-fledged collection of observability tools and dashboards that cover end-to-end the integration and API lifecycle, of which API Insight and governance plays a part.
That means insightful analytics across Anypoint, from API deployments through to traditional monitoring, incident management, usage and extensibility – we’re investing in offering insights at every step of the process, which we’ll be talking about further later this year.
