How to design an API Analytics solution?

When designing or evaluating an API Analytics solution on top of your API Management infrastructure, you need to consider a solution that addresses each user’s specific need [See previous article Monitoring APIs: who should be in charge in your organization?]. This will help you provide a high-value Embedded Analytics solution with tangible business benefits for end-users.

There are basic principles that you can follow to design a good analytics solution:

1. Start by defining who is going to use the dashboards.
2. What are his main operational objectives?
3. What are the concerns/reasons he has that can prevent him to meet objectives
4. And finally, if we give him actionable insight, what dashboards can help him to identify business issues and what kind of proactive action he can take.

Let’s take the example of the API Product Manager. He’s often part of the marketing team but can also be in IT. He manages and promotes the API Catalog and needs to provide attractive APIs. His key business goals focus on increasing revenue, retaining customers and growing the API ecosystem.

The API Product Manager needs an API Analytics solution tailored to his specific needs. By providing insight into how APIs are used, with different perspectives: geographic distribution, device usage, OS usage, by empowering him to track end-users consumption, the API Product Manager can understand the overall activity and trends and focus on his key business goals: increasing revenue, retaining customers and growing the API ecosystem.

Here is an example of an Embedded API Analytics solution designed for the API Product Manager.

This dashboard helps him answer typical questions such as:

• Top APIs and apps impacting growth: Which APIs are most popular? Which client applications are the most active?
• What is API usage (traffic, volume)?
• Which APIs have abnormal usage changes?
• How many APIs have been active during a specific period?
• Which communication protocols are the most active?