We consistently hear from clients and prospects that they want better observability and analytics about the performance of their APIs, regardless of whether they plan to monetize them. Various business drivers compel the importance for better API observability, useful API performance analytics, and information about API reliability. This post summarizes the key insights from these conversations.
Insight 1:
Engineering Leaders Want Better API Performance Data to Make Real-Time Product Improvements
As competition ramps up in APIs-centric products, data-driven decisions can mean the difference between success and failure. API analytics provides the data-centric insight that guides product improvements and innovation. Working with our clients, we've seen firsthand how analytics can shape product development. For instance, one of the SaaS applications we support experienced a surge in API traffic during a product launch. Using API analytics, the client could track usage patterns, identify bottlenecks, and optimize their infrastructure for a better customer experience. Without detailed awareness of the performance of each of their endpoints, they would have missed the opportunity to enhance the user experience and potentially churned users due to slow response times.
Insight 2:
API Observability is a Cornerstone to Ensuring Reliability
In the realm of APIs, reliability is paramount. API clients depend on streamlined access to your services, and any downtime leads to frustration and lost opportunities. With real-time API monitoring, logging, and tracing, engineering teams can better observe and maintain the reliability of their API products - both from the perspective of what is happening NOW and what happened in the PAST. Let's look deeper at these observability use cases.
The Here and Now - Real-Time Monitoring:
Understanding what is happening with an API at any point in time is crucial to managing and maintaining the product's health. Effective real-time API alerting should be configurable to detect anomalies, including sudden surges (or drops) in traffic, unusual latency or error rates, and anomalous activity that may indicate security threats. With correctly configured alerts, engineering teams can proactively address issues before they impact large numbers of users.
In fact, we recently relied on real-time monitoring with Revenium's product when a specific endpoint suddenly exhibited a sharp increase in error rates. Thanks to proper observability, we identified the root cause - a misconfiguration during what we expected to be a low-risk change - and resolved it within minutes, preventing potential service disruption.
Whoa - What Just Happened? Logging and Tracing:
Logging and tracing are the digital breadcrumbs that help dev teams reconstruct the journey of an API request. They provide invaluable information about what happened during a transaction and help pinpoint issues, even in complex, distributed systems.
Consider a scenario where an alert indicates a transaction failure. With proper logging and tracing, the dev team can trace the request route, identify the specific point of failure, and promptly resolve the issue. Comparatively, without granular event observability, a problem like this can take hours or days to resolve and lead to customer churn or SLA payments.
In our next post in this series, we'll share the most meaningful examples of how proper API observability has benefited our clients and led to significant business outcomes.
If you want to improve API observability for your business, you can start using Revenium for free - sign up using the form below. Within minutes, you can see new insights about your APIs, including their overall health and performance.
