7 Best API Analytics Solutions to Build a Great Experience

We are in the era of abstraction, wherein end-users do not care about the hidden details as long as their tasks are fulfilled.

Compactness is one of the precursors that has led to the conceptualization of APIs, the preferred method for integrating internal and external digital assets and binding applications.

Consider the following restaurant example: It is a venue where individuals can speak with waiters about what they want, place an order from a menu, and then sit down to enjoy their meal. Guests are not required to understand what goes on behind the scenes when orders are placed, the kitchen operation, or any other little chores in the restaurant.

The API consists of the waiter and the menu: it informs consumers of their options. The waiter communicates and delivers those options while also taking care of the money.

When it comes to the vast majority of companies, APIs are simply pieces of code that aid in the performance of tasks. An API management tool can help an organization achieve data interoperability between various apps.

In today’s hyper-connected world, you need to handle APIs with greater refinement if you’re involved in the API economy and want to start seeing APIs as a source of revenue or growth.

What is API Analytics?

API analytics and monitoring encompass engineering-focused metrics like performance, uptime, product metrics, retention, and developer conversion.

API analytics allows you to filter, sort, and aggregate API event data before presenting the results in correlated charts, tables, and maps.

To help you manage service levels, set quotas, establish controls, set up security policies, manage communities, and analyze trends; and several methods for performing such analysis, ranging from basic SQL and Excel to purpose-built API analytics platforms.

API Analytics KPI (Key Performance Insights)

API analytics uncovers surprising trends that help both IT and business leaders optimize the KPIs they utilize analytics to generate. Let’s look at some Key Performance Insights while analyzing and monitoring your APIs.

KPIs for operations

Call latency (average and maximum): P1 latency, also known as elapsed time, is a critical metric that influences customer experiences. Breaking this KPI down into detailed metrics (e.g., networking times, server process, and upload download speeds) can provide additional insights for measuring the performance of APIs.

Total pass and error rates: The success of API Operations can be measured as the function of the number of API calls that result in non-200 status codes while assisting organizations in determining how buggy or error-prone an API is. To track total pass and error rates, it is necessary first to understand the types of errors that occur during API usage.

API Service Level Agreements (SLA): While one of the most elementary metrics, API Service Level Agreements (SLA) are the benchmark for measuring a service’s availability. Many enterprise SLAs leave little to no room for error for software providers.

To provide this level of service, a provider’s upstream APIs must be operational, which necessitates API monitoring and analytics to ensure that the service is running well and swiftly diagnosing any issues.

Adoption KPI

KPIs for API Adoption Developers: This goal is commonly aimed at improving API adoption. Enterprises must consider using this metric in conjunction with other metrics that confirm the business utility of a given API.

API traffic: By continuously monitoring, improving, and driving value through APIs, this target can assist API programs in developing a strong DevOps culture. Enterprises should consider coupling this goal with related metrics up and down the value chain, such as backend reliability and scalability.

API product adoption: Key patterns in API adoption can be identified through retention and churn. A product with a high retention rate, for example, is closer to finding its market fit than a product with a churn problem. Instead of subscription retention, product retention tracks the actual usage, such as an API.

KPIs for Business Impact

Revenue, both direct and indirect: Tracking how APIs contribute to income is one of the purposes of these goals. Businesses can directly monetize APIs by offering them as paid services or goods to partners and external developers when they provide access to scarce and valuable datasets or particularly important and difficult-to-replicate functionality.

However, an API can often generate more value if enterprises focus on adoption rather than upfront revenue.

Partners: Use this target to increase partner outreach, drive adoption, and demonstrate success to existing business units.

Cost: By reusing APIs rather than starting new custom integration efforts for each new project, businesses can save money.

When developers use standardized APIs to connect to existing data and services, enterprises can identify instances where reusable APIs have saved money that would otherwise have gone to new integration projects by tracking API usage.

Similarly, because APIs automate and accelerate many processes, businesses can identify how specific APIs contribute to accelerated development cycles and quick completion of business processes and the number of resources saved in the process.

Let’s now look at the top API analytics solutions.

Moesif

Moesif is an excellent API monitoring framework. Not only can one trace every one of the requests (complete with request/response payloads), but one can also query by any param.

In seconds, one can build queries like “Show me the monthly requested entities by company A with a response time greater than X.”