When you’re providing APIs to your customers, you want to ensure they are getting value from them. At the same time, the best APIs are designed to be fully automated without requiring human intervention. This can leave your customers in the dark on whether your API is even being used by the organization and if you’re meeting any SLA obligations in your enterprise contracts.
Types of metrics to surface
Most API first companies have some sort of developer portal for customers to log into, manage API keys, and customize features. This area is a great way to also expose key metrics to your customers demonstrating how much value they are getting from your API. This can be as simple as a counter showing number of API transactions made within a billing period or provide additional metrics around what those transactions are. Each customer has different metrics they want to look at. Developers will want to look at access logs where as product and engineering leadership are more interested in usage and performance metrics. Finally, the finance department may need to look at billing usage for capacity and financial planning.