What is API Analytics?

An important part of API management revolves around analytics. When building an API platform, it is essential to have in place a dashboard to measure API performance. Properly setting up an API analytics module will give you end-to-end visibility into your API development. This is done through an API analytics platform.

What to measure

Key analytics include API usage, transactions by region, and performance against Service Level Agreements (SLA). You can get this level of granularity by integrating key data points into your dashboard including date, location, application, and platform type.

With the right tools in place, you can gain real-time visibility into your entire API ecosystem. This includes apps, consumption, API performance and usage metrics like latency, response times, traffic trends and spikes, and other custom criteria.

Ready-to-use analytics dashboards

API owners rely on API global metrics including volume and traffic. Axway offers API owners ready-to-use analytics dashboards using Embedded Analytics for API Management (APIM). Using APIM, API owners can view API Health, Consumer Engagement, API usage and Infrastructure Health.

This info is displaced in cockpit dashboards which includes an overview of all the metrics an API owner would need, as well as drill downs for specific parameters or past events. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) include failure rates, high response time, high transactions per second (TPS) and high exception.

Who benefits from API Analytics

Similar KPIs can be found for other roles on the API team:

• An API product manager is focused on overall API usage and is therefore looking for insights on API usage metrics over time.
• API community managers manage the relationship with the ecosystem. Their goal is to be proactive when identifying consumers with abnormal application consumption.
• API platform owners are tasked with proactively identifying resources and gateway bottlenecks and errors that couple impact operations.

A ready-to-use analytics dashboard offers real-time views for each of these users.