Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns towards effective decision making.- Wikipedia

Anypoint API analytics are metrics that provide insights into how your MuleSoft APIs are performing within your application network. API analytics can help determine if your investment in technology is supporting your company’s efforts in successfully meeting its business outcomes.

By using the MuleSoft API analytics, your organization has a window to understanding many insights such as: what APIs are being called, when they are being called and by who, how the API performed, the size of inbound and outbound payloads, policy violations, HTTP status codes, response times and more.

How can AVIO help with API Analytics?

There are limitations on the size of the analytics dataset per report that can be downloaded from the Anypoint platform. Additionally, the Anypoint platform is limited to predefined dashboards for viewing the analytics data. To enable our customers total freedom on how they want to analyze and display their API analytics, AVIO pulls a copy of the Anypoint API analytics data in real-time into a hosted Elastic cluster. Each Managed Services customer is provisioned with an Elastic cluster supporting not just the log aggregation of their MuleSoft API’s but full access to their API analytics data.

Once the analytics data is available in the Elastic, you can leverage the powerful visualization tools of Kibana, a component of the Elastic stack. Kibana provides the ability to create dashboards that incorporate dynamic graphs, charts, time-series, geospatial queries and much more. AVIO provides a set of standard dashboards to give immediate visibility into your API analytics data and will work with you to create once-off views specific to your needs.

One benefit of leveraging an external tool such as Elastic is that you can overlay API metrics with additional external metrics.  This aggregation allows for a more thorough view of the entire API lifecycle and system health.

AVIO also provides weekly reports that include your API analytics where we highlight issues or trends.  Depending on the customer requirements, AVIO has the ability to alert off API analytics data and notify customers based on predetermined high watermarks that may signify that all is not well.

Here are some of the best practices for tracking API analytics:

1. Keep a history of your analytics information:

A longer history enables you to see meaningful data trends over time. As an example, if you find that over time, you have an increasing number of requests, it may lead you to increase the capacity supporting your APIs.

2. Have a tool to overlay metrics: 

Having a tool that allows you to map one metric with other metrics can provide meaningful insight. The ability to overlay a response time metric with other metrics such as payload size or time of day may help you uncover and resolve bottlenecks in your environment.

3. Review metrics before and after key events for: 

Analytics can provide feedback on API performance after there are changes in your environment. In addition, they allow you to review response times after API changes are deployed to ensure there has been no degradation in the responsiveness of your MuleSoft ecosystem. 

4. Monitor for anomalies:

API analytics can be used to monitor for anomalies. Changes in normal patterns can be detected and responded to. An example might include increases in policy violations from one week to another. Without monitoring, these anomalies may not be detected exposing your organization to unnecessary risk. 

5. Baseline analytics expectations for new APIs:

If you are monitoring analytics as part of a monitoring strategy it’s important to set realistically expected behavior metrics for the new API. Invest time talking to the API owner to understand the expected API behavior. Monitor closely for the first month and adjust expectations if required.

6. Use analytic dashboards and reports:

These visualizations can provide value and insight to both internal and external customers in an easily consumable format.

Today, most organizations treat analytics as a strategic asset, and analytics is central to many functional roles and skills. MuleSoft API analytics are an important component in exposing how your technology investments are helping business outcomes.  At AVIO, we understand the importance of leveraging best practices for tracking API analytics and using those to drive further improvement in your digital journey. With AVIO as your partner, we do the hard work in changing data to insight.

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” – Carly Fiorina, former executive, president, and chair of Hewlett-Packard Co.

Contact us to find out more.