What are API Analytics?
API Analytics are high-level monitoring and troubleshooting tools to monitor API traffic and usage. These are useful to API companies because they are providing a service to customers. They want to provide the best API service they can, and monetize it effectively. API analytics provide valuable data such as:
- Time
- Geography
- APIs
- API operations
- Products
- Subscriptions
- Users
- Requests
Where can I see API Analytics?
If you're enrolled in an API portal like Abstract, your Dashboard has a section called Usage where you can see your API usage. This data is useful to developers, who are possibly signed up on a paid subscription basis, and want to use their monthly request quota efficiently. They might also want to troubleshoot requests that are failing and figure out why.
Troubleshooting with API Analytics
This Google case study outlines some ways they used their Apigee Analytics service to troubleshoot problems. In their example, a customer is complaining because one of the APIs is too slow. What could be the source of this problem, and how can we use API analytics to fix it?
- If the slowness being seen by just one app or is it from multiple apps? If one app, then it might be a problem with the app.
- If it is being seen by multiple users across multiple apps and users seem to be in the same geo location, then it could be a network issue.
- If you're not seeing either of these issue, it could be an issue with the API analytics. If you recently added or updated a policy, it could be configured incorrectly.
- If the total response time is being reported as high, but the average endpoint response time has not changed, it might be an API management issue.
Imagine testing for these issues with no data and no data visualization. It'd be a nightmare! Luckily, API analytics are monitoring our API's usage, and we can check off some of these troubleshooting steps without losing production or end-to-end testing, and eventually finding our issue.
Conclusion
API analytics is a dashboard for your API that measures everything you might want to know about your traffic. This data helps you keep customers, management, and engineering happy with your API, and can help you solve problems before they appear, and troubleshoot when they do.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is API analytics?
API analytics are high-level monitoring and troubleshooting tools used to track API traffic and usage. They act as a dashboard for your API that measures the things you want to know about how it is being used.
How does API analytics work?
Analytics dashboards aggregate API data and present it visually, so developers get real-time insight into how their API is being consumed. This helps teams manage monthly request quotas and spot failing requests.
What metrics does API analytics track?
API analytics commonly measure time and geography data, API operations and products, subscriptions and user information, and request volumes. Together these data points give a full picture of API traffic.
Why does API analytics matter?
API analytics let teams identify problems proactively before they escalate and troubleshoot issues without disrupting production. This supports data-driven decisions that improve service quality and satisfaction for customers, management, and engineering.
How does API analytics help with troubleshooting?
When users report a slow API, analytics help pinpoint whether the issue comes from individual apps, geographic network problems, misconfigured policies, or the API management itself. Testing for these issues without data and data visualization would be impractical.
Why is API analytics important for API companies?
It helps API companies deliver higher service quality and supports effective monetization strategies. By understanding usage patterns, they can manage quotas, support customers, and make informed decisions about their product.
