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Using XML Policies to Log and Analyze API Calls from Azure API Management

Azure API Management (APIM) is a powerful platform that enables you to publish and scale APIs while ensuring they are secured. One of the great features of Azure APIM is that you can add plugins and transforms to your APIs without any code change or restarts.

These capabilities are deployed using XML Policies which are a collection of statements. Moesif API Observability can be added in just a few minutes using an XML policy for APIM which makes it easy get visibility into API calls, even ones that are rejected and never reach your underlying service.

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What is API Observability

API Observability is a key component to properly execute APIOps Cycles and ensure your building something of value for your API users. If you’re not familiar with APIOps Cycles, take a look at this guide which provides an agile framework to quickly build APIs that are business-oriented and serve customer needs. API Observability itself is an evolution of traditional monitoring and born out of control systems theory.

Traditional monitoring focuses on tracking known unknowns. This means you already know what to measure like Request Per Second or Errors Per Second. While the metric value may be unknown beforehand, you already know what to measure or probe such as a counter to track requests into buckets. This makes it possible to report on the health of a system (like Red, Yellow, Green), but is a bad tool for troubleshooting engineering or business issues which usually require asking arbitrary questions.

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APIs Over IPAs: Mike Amundsen [Podcast]

Moesif’s Podcast Network: Providing actionable insights for API product managers and other API professionals.

In episode number 4 we have the well known author and speaker Mike Amundsen. He’s a prolific writer on all things APIs and recently released his latest book entitled Design and Build Great Web APIs: Robust, Reliable, and Resilient. When he’s not writing, Mike helps companies capitalize on opportunities in APIs, Microservices, and Digital Transformation.

Mike shares his perspectives on why organizations think about APIs in three levels, how AWS’s Werner Vogel does deprecation, what the future holds for API automation tools, and many more knowledgeable insights .

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How to Properly Deprecate APIs

As with any product lifecycle, a key responsibility for API architects and API product owners is deciding when to sunset or retire a feature or offering. The API lifecycle is no different, but requires careful planning to carry out the deprecation to minimize customer impact. Unlike a packaged solution or module which is more of a black box, APIs enable your customers to build custom functionality which may have requires months of integration work and testing. Without the correct assessment or process, you could prematurely deprecate a critical service causing a storm of support tickets.

This guide walks through the best practices of deprecating an endpoint and shows, by example, how to do it with an analytics platform.

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How To Accelerate API Integration with Behavioral Emails and Developer Segmentation

Behavioral email is the keystone of user-centric platform integration — emails to developers are most effective when they’re based on how they used your platform. Not surprisingly, the concept of segmenting your customers into groups of similar behaviors or attitudes is a well established best practice in marketing.

MarketSherpa’s survey found that one of the most effective marketing strategies is to send emails based on the behavior of your customers. Familiar examples in the B2C world include, notification that a service was signed up for but registration wasn’t completed, receipt of collateral after a form submission, and invitation to check out after a shopping cart was abandoned.

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API Tools for Every Phase of the API Lifecycle

When you set out to build your first API, it can very well be that you are either overwhelmed or forget essential points. The ecosystem for API tools is vast, and it’s vital to get the right tool for every phase of your project.

In this article, we will go through the different phases an API project usually has. For every phase, I will list the significant points and tools that help there.

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Benefits of Using the OpenAPI (Swagger) Specification for Your APIs

With software products becoming just a bunch of micro-services and third-party APIs mashed together, it's more crucial than ever to get their structure in order.

GraphQL already did this at its inception by coming up with a whole specification that describes how APIs of its type should behave. In the RESTful API landscape, things were a bit more wild west. However, even if not all backend devs know it, there are a number of specifications for REST APIs as well.

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What Does API Monitoring Mean for API Product Managers and Growth Teams

Today, countless engineering teams have leveraged API monitoring to track infrastructure health and report when services are down or unhealthy. There are a variety of API metrics that can be tracked that are aligned with engineering goals, such as uptime, average latency, requests per minute, and errors per minute. 

However, these metrics are not aligned with the business goals of product owners and growth teams. This article goes through how to leverage API monitoring tools to further your business growth and product road map.

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User-Centric API Metrics vs Infrastructure Metrics: Choose the Right Analytics Architecture and Data Store

Looking to build an analytics system? This post covers storing time-based metrics vs user-centric metrics.

In just a few short years, data-driven teams went from not enough data to drowning in a sea of metrics. Every action, reaction, and result can now be tracked, processed, and analyzed. However, a key question we’ve received is which metrics are important and which analytics architecture and data store is best suited for a particular analytics requirement.

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API Management vs API Gateway: Where Does API Analytics and Monitoring Fit?

For the last few years, there has been an explosion of API-powered businesses. There are revenue-generating APIs, developer platforms, partner marketplaces, and even internal APIs powering single-page apps.

With this explosion, there has also been a large increase in API tooling to help these companies go to market with their API platforms as quickly as possible and out-innovate any competition. Much of this increase in tooling mirrors what we saw in the mobile era. However, with this explosion, there is now an increase in the number of tools and solutions to build and grow APIs and platforms.