API Traffic Management 101

Appendix A. From Monitoring to Managing and Beyond

This book covered a lot of area in a short amount of time. But it is important to keep in mind that no one can introduce all of the things here all at once.

At the start you need to understand what’s at stake (Chapter 1) and the fundamentals of establishing your traffic management approach (Chapter 2) and tackling the basics of monitoring and reporting important traffic values and trends (Chapter 3).

Once you have your foundation set, you can spend time shoring up your system-wide security (Chapter 4) and begin to expand your API traffic program’s scope from just dealing with day-to-day safety and stability toward “surviving the network” (Chapter 5). Eventually you can begin designing traffic management features that allow you to fix problems automatically and run safe and valuable experiments that help you anticipate the needs of your internal staff as well as your external customers and partners (Chapter 6).

As more companies progress along this path of treating API traffic management as another essential engineering practice, we’re bound to see more tooling and API management platforms adopt these same principles, and that means everyone gets better at monitoring, securing, scaling, and ultimately managing not just your APIs but also your business. It all begins now with your initial steps to apply what you find here to your own company in your own unique way.