What is API Analytics?

Publishing an API for external consumption is just one step in an API lifecycle. Acquiring a deeper understanding of the ongoing business and technical impact of your APIs requires robust API analytics. Successful developer adoption of APIs requires monitoring and management of all operational aspects of an API program.

Why Use API Analytics?

• Get insight-driven results: Real time data insight on the ecosystem—apps, consumption, performance, and usage metrics (spikes, latency, response times)—to get end-to-end program visibility
• Manage Risk: Real time operational metrics drive decision-making and protect the API program from cyberattacks.
• Improve customer experience: Build better relationships with customers (developer and API consumers) and drive decisions based on data insights (measure engagement and API performance)
• Monitor KPIs: Track and measure API use across products, apps, channels, and locations.

Common Questions Asked

Answering the following questions will help you improve your API platform, resolve issues, and make better business decisions:

• How is my API traffic performing?
• Which API methods are most popular?
• Who are the top API developers?
• Are there issues impeding response time?
• Where is the most API traffic located?

Benefits of API Analytics

Get Operational Visibility into API Performance

Monitor for trends and patterns in your API usage, including latency, error rates, cache performance, usage patterns, and call spikes. View results in a variety of easy-to-understand dashboards for intelligent API analytics.

Understand How Your APIs Are Being Used

See at a glance who is using, and how they’re using, your APIs. API analytics to help you understand usage at the method level to spot trends in adoption and usage patterns.

Troubleshoot Using API Call Tracing

Having problems with API errors? Use our real-time call tracing feature to drill down into API call flows to help identify problem areas and failure points.

Export Call Log Data for External Use

Have it your way. Export the full range of API call log data to TIBCO Spotfire (or the customized API analytics environment of your choice) and push log data to billing software to monetize your APIs.

Get API Access to Dashboard & Reporting Data

Access any of the data displayed in the out-of-the-box dashboards and reports via an API reporting tool for programmatic export and reuse.

Types of API Analytics Reporting

High-level: Executive Summary

The Executive Summary page provides a high-level view of your Application Programming Interface (API) program with new analytic metrics and trends in an easy-to-share format for executive stakeholder audiences throughout your organization.

The Executive Summary is designed to deliver a comprehensive suite of insights quickly and efficiently without any data collection and analysis tasks required. The Executive Summary is a complement to the existing reports also available on the administration dashboard and is designed for a wide audience such as API Administrators, API Product Managers, Business Development Executives, Marketing Executives, and Technical Executive Leadership.

Medium-level: Reports

Reports provide data visualizations to assist in monitoring the technical performance and business metrics of APIs, packages, plans, endpoints, and developers.

Users access reports to:

• View API usage summary
• View technical API performance data
• View developer activity
• View and analyze the API call latency
• View and analyze error responses

Low-level: Call Log Exports, Call Log Stream, and Call Inspector

Call Log Exports

The Call Log Exports feature allows you to access and filter raw API call logs and export them as CSV files. New logs are delivered every 30 minutes and include detailed API call information such as source IP address, URI, service name, and endpoint names. There are numerous possible use cases for this data, including fine-grained billing, abuse detection, and troubleshooting.

Call Log Stream

The main Call Log Streams page displays a navigable list of all Call Log Stream channel records. You can access the following information:

• Channel Name: The name of the Call Log Stream's channel; the default name is "Channel for area name"
• Status: The status of the channel, either Enabled or Disabled
• Created: The date and time when the channel was created
• Updated: The date and time when the channel was last updated

Call Inspector

Call Inspector is a diagnostic feature that is used to trace API calls as they pass through the system. It gives detailed information about how requests and responses actually look as they pass through different points. Customers can use Call Inspector for such use cases as troubleshooting API calls or supporting new integrations. The API call data can be captured by enabling the call logs for a specified endpoint and time period.

API Analytics Metrics

Each team will want to track different metrics. API metrics for infrastructure teams will be different from the API metrics for product teams. API metrics can also depend on the API product life cycle. For example, a new API will focus more on improving design and usage while an older API may focus additional features.

There are four main groups that depend on API metrics:

DevOps

DevOps teams ensure servers are running and limited resources are correctly allocated, potentially for multiple engineering teams.

There are several metrics important to this team:

• Uptime
• CPU usage
• Memory usage

Application Engineering

API developers add new features to APIs while resolving issues in the API business logic. They develop products like plugins, partner integrations, incorporated APIs, and more.

Three metrics important to this team are:

• Request Per Minute (RPM)
• Average and Max Latency
• Errors Per Minute

Product Management

API product managers design API features, ensure the right endpoints are built, and balance the needs of customers with time constraints.

Some metrics important to this team are:

• API Usage Growth
• Unique API Customers
• Top Customers by API Usage
• API Retention
• Time to First Hello World (TTFHW)
• API Calls per Business Transaction
• SDK and Version Adoption

Business Growth

Business-facing teams such as marketing and sales typically do not think in terms of API endpoints. They are more interested in customer adoption and seeing which users could be new sales opportunities.

Three metrics important to this team are:

• Revenue
• Adoption
• Customer Success