How to Monitor API’s Using API Analytics

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Hello Readers! In this blog we’ll see How to Monitor API’s Using API Analytics. Firstly we’ll see apigee analytics and after that we’ll see that how to Monitor API’s Using API Analytics. So stick to the end with me and see how we can do that.

Let’s get started !!!

Introduction

Apigee Analytics collects and calculates a wealth of information that flows through API Proxies , You can visualize its data in the apigee UI with predefined analytics dashboards as well as custom reports.

You can also generates secuirty reports to identify security threats to your APIs through apigee UI.

Apigee API Analytics collects and analyzes a broad spectrum of data that flows across API proxies such as Response time,Request latency,Request size,Target errors,API product name,Developer email address,App name,Transaction revenue.

For a complete listing of data collected by API Analytics, see Analytics metrics, dimensions, and filters reference.

Now let’s Monitor API’s Using API Analytics.

Analytics and API Monitoring tabs in the Apigee UI.

As you can see in the above image API Analytics covers :

  • API Metrics
  • Developers
  • End Users
  • Custom Reports
  • API Security : It will be seen on your apigee UI when you have a Advanced API Security enabled.

Apigee Anaytics includes :

  • predefined analytics dashboards
  • custom reports 

Analytics Predefined Dashboards:

Apigee Analytics Dashboards helps us to see and detect changes in the API ecosystem and also helps us to visualize analytics data. Various predefined analytics dashboards Apigee UI contains are as follows :

  • API proxy Performance
  • Cache Performance
  • Error Code Analysis
  • Target Performance
  • Latency Analysis
  • Geomap
  • Devices
  • Traffic Composition

Now let’s see these dashboards one by one.

1.API proxy Performance:

This dashboard helps us to see API proxy traffic patterns and processing times.It also helps us in visualizing how much traffic APIs generate how long  it takes for API calls to be processed.

To access the API Proxy Performance Dashboard:

  • Sign in to the Apigee UI
  • Select Analyze > API Metrics > API Proxy Performance.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

The above image shows the last 7 days of Proxy Performance of all the Proxies .This dashboard includes these charts:

  • Traffic
  • Average Response Time
  • Traffic By Proxy
  • Average Response time by proxy

This dashboard provides several types of interactivity as the list area to the right of each chart is interactive. Select a line in the list to toggle its view in the chart

NOTE: To know more about this CLICK 

2. Cache Performance:

It helps us to see a glance the value of your Apigee cache. It also helps us to visualize the benefit of the cache in terms of lower latency and reduced load backend servers.

To access the API Proxy Performance Dashboard:

  • Sign in to the Apigee UI
  • Select Analyze > API Metrics > Cache Performance.

This dashboard measure metrics as follows:

Average cache hit rate
All cache hits
Cache hits by app
Average time with cache
Average time without cache
Cache improvement

NOTE: to know more about cache performance CLick

 3. Error Code Analysis

Error code analysis tells you about the amount of error rates for API proxies and targets. The Error Code Analysis dashboard uses:

  • The response code to calculate proxy errors
  • The target response code to calculate target errors

NOTE: Errors reported on the Error Code Analysis dashboard might be different from errors reported on the API Proxy Performance dashboard because that dashboard calculates error rates based on the is_error flow variable.

To access the API Proxy Performance Dashboard:

  • Sign in to the Apigee UI
  • Select Analyze > API Metrics > Error Code Analysis.

The dashboard for Error Code Analysis looks like :

This dashboard measures :

  • Error Composition
  • Proxy Errors
  • Target Errors
  • Error by Proxy
  • Error by Target
  • Proxy Error by Response Code
  • Target errors by response code

As in the above image you see the Error Code Analysis Dashboard helps you see the error composition , proxy errors and proxy error by response code for all the proxies you have in your apigee.

NOTE: to know more about error code analysis as its various metrics follow Link

4. Target Performance

The Target Performance dashboard helps you visualise traffic patterns and performance metrics for API proxy backend targets.

To access the Target Performance dashboard:

  1. Sign in to the Apigee UI.
  2. Select Analyze > API Metrics > Target Performance.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

It measures the fields as :

  • Traffic by Target
  • Traffic
  • Response Time
  • Target Error
  • Payload Size

NOTE: to know more about this dashboard Click

5. Latency Analysis

The Latency Analysis dashboard can alert you to any latency issues your API proxies may be experiencing. It displays latency measurements down to the window of a minute, highlighting the median, 95th percentile, and 99th percentile values.

To access the Latency Analysis dashboard:

  1. Sign in to Apigee UI.
  2. Select Analyze > API Metrics > Latency Analysis.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

This dashboard measures metrics as Response time, Target response time, Response processing latency and Request processing latency .

NOTE: to know more Click

6. Geomap

The Geo Map dashboard tracks traffic patterns, error patterns, and quality of service across geographical locations.

To access the GeoMap dashboard:

  1. Sign in to Apigee UI.
  2. Select Analyze > End Users > Geomap.

This dashboard helps you assess:

  • API growth trends – Use the Traffic metric to see where your traffic is coming from.
  • Error trends – Use the Error Count metric to see where API errors are coming from.
  • Quality of service – Use the Average Response Time and Average Target Response Time metrics to see how the backend services are performing by country.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

This dashboard measure traffic , error count , Average response tine and Average target response time .

NOTE: Click here to know more about geomapping.

7. Devices Dashboard

The Devices dashboard tells you about the devices and servers that are being used to access your APIs.

To access the Devices dashboard:

  1. Sign in to Apigee UI.
  2. Select Analyze > End Users > Devices.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

This dashboard measures the metrics as:

  • Traffic by OS Family
  • Traffic by agent
  • Traffic by agent type
  • Traffic by Device Category

NOTE: To know more CLICK

8. Traffic Composition

The Traffic Composition dashboard measures the relative contribution of the top APIs, apps, developers, and products to your overall API program.

To access the Traffic Composition dashboard:

  1. Sign in to Apigee UI.
  2. Select Analyze > Developers > Traffic Composition.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

This dashboard measures metrics as:

  • Overview
  • By dimensions

NOTE: Click here to know more about Traffic Composition.

Custom Reports:

  • Custom Reports are a way to specify precisely what you want to measure across your API Program and comes under API Analaytics.
  • They allow you to specify dimensions that you would like to watch out in your API Traffic .
  • It is also helpful in listing all client IP addresses that are hitting your apis.

To access the custom reports page using the Apigee UI:

  1. Sign in to Apigee UI.
  2. Select Analyze > Custom Reports > Reports

The custom reports page displays all custom reports that have been created for your organisation, as shown in the following figure:

the custom reports page enables you to:

  • View a list of all custom reports.
  • Add a custom report.
  • Run a custom report by clicking its name in the list. The report is run using the data collected over the last hour by default.
  • Search the list of custom reports by entering all or part of a relevant string in the search box.
  • Delete a custom report.

NOTE: One can generate custom reports for these metrics :

Follow Link : https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-platform/analytics/analytics-reference

Some examples to create custom reports for above metrics are as :

  •  Average Transactions per second
  • Cache Hit
  • Traffic by Proxy
  • API Error Report
  • API Latency Report
  • Policy Error

Average Transaction Per Second 

It means API proxy requests , per second .Custom report for average transaction per second looks like :

Cache Hit

It means  the Number of successful API requests that use the ResponseCache instead of the response from the target service.Custom Report for cache hit look likes:

Traffic by Proxy

It means that the Total number of API calls processed by Apigee in the specified time period. THe traffic by proxy custom reports generates data as :

API Error Report

API Error Report means the Total number of times API proxies failed over the specified time period . THe reports shows data as :

API Latency Report

It means the Amount of time in milliseconds, that it takes Apigee to process API responses. It’s report look like:

Policy Errors

It means that the Total number of policy errors over the specified time period.Custom Reports to check the occurrence of policy errors in the API call displays as:

NOTE : We can create Custom Reports for other metrics to see the exact data we want to see for our proxies monitoring .

Conclusion

So, In this blog we have seen that how we can monitor api’s using API analytics. Hope this blog is helpful and you have learned a new thing to achieve and to monitor api’s performance.

Thank You !!!

Happy Learning !!!

Reference

https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-platform/analytics/create-custom-reports

https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-platform/analytics/analytics-reference

Written by 

Deeksha Tripathi is a Software Consultant at Knoldus Inc Software. She has a keen interest toward learning new technologies. Her practice area is DevOps. When not working, she will be busy in listening music , and spending time with her family .

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