As Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and their associated traffic become more common in organizations large and small, new challenges emerge in how to both monitor and manage this new data. For the purposes of this book, monitoring is the act of collecting and observing your API ecosystem’s behavior (e.g., the number of API calls per minute), and managing is the process of analyzing, reaching conclusions, and acting on those conclusions (e.g., whether your API calls are unusual and what is needed to change that). As I travel around the world and talk to companies about how they are dealing with this new flood of data within their organization I note that most of them are struggling just to grasp the job of monitoring itself. And it is no small job.
In this chapter, we explore the challenge and the advantage of a broad-ranging API traffic management approach. This includes the work of monitoring traffic in order to collect data and improve the observability of your APIs as well as the notion of actively managing your API program using the insights gained from your traffic metrics (see Figure 1-1). Getting a handle on these two concepts will help you place API traffic management as a central pillar in your healthy API program and set you on the path to determining just what to track and how to use that information to improve your company’s API program.
Figure 1-1. Progressing from monitoring to managing API traffic
Knowing ...
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