Growing a Business with API Monitoring and Analytics

When businesses analyze API data, they can determine the relationship between different elements of information and see any patterns that exist. However, that data alone can be worthless if companies do not also embrace API monitoring. By monitoring the APIs companies use, businesses can ensure apps and systems are connected, and that the data is flowing where and when it should.

API Monitoring
APIs are interfaces that allow developers to leverage data or applications. Most businesses have hundreds or thousands of APIS, so it is important to protect those APIs, control who has access to them, and monitor the APIs’ behavior.

For years, most businesses did not monitor any of their APIs, while others only paid attention to API subsets. Thankfully, as APIs have become broadly recognized as business drivers, more businesses have woken up to the value of monitoring APIs. Your business’s economy partially relies on the digital experiences that APIs drive, so it is essential you monitor and maintain them with a range of processes and tools.

API Analytics
With a turnkey API analytics solution, you can instrument API management tools rather than having to instrument every system or subsystem across your whole enterprise. And when you collect data via instrumenting all API activities, you will receive enough information to help you analyze specific aspects of your business and gain a richer understanding of its inner workings. By leveraging that data to your advantage, you can start to grow your business accordingly.

You can update the analytics capabilities by updating your API management software. You can then have one single system to manage API data, instead of having multiple systems. That will also save your company time and money. API data that you collect via analyzation can include:

• The request and response. This includes things like timestamps, full message, message size, headers, and request path URL.
• The invocation. This includes elements like the IP address, user agent, and username.
• Processing. This includes API name, times started and ended, errors, outcome, protocol, and hostname.

Using analytics tools to understand API data, you can build a detailed picture of which users are invoking APIs and where and when they are doing so. You can then analyze that data further to understand a customer’s journey. For example, you can learn what activities led a customer to purchase your product or service and understand the loads that an API receives.

Using API Data with Mapping to Business Concepts
Once you have the data from API analytics, you need to use the information for mappings to business concepts. For example:

• As well as knowing how many requests are received, it will be helpful also to have insights into the money flows related to each request.
• As well as knowing only the API name, it will be helpful to know which business area the API belongs to.
• As well as knowing the customer name, it will be helpful to use additional customer demographics.

Basically, the more deeply you delve into data, the more information you can gain. And the more data you have, the more you can use it to generate business growth.