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Monitor, Measure and Analyze
Get StartedThe goal of Lean is to improve so-called cycle time and quality. With Lean API Development and APIOps Cycles, it means you can make good APIs in a short time. And not just good, but better for business.
Monitor, Measure and Analyze
Use business and technical metrics to learn how your API works and how the developers and end-users use it.
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Monitor your API
Is your API functioning? Is the performance acceptable? Is your system properly scaled? Is there unusual activity?
Imagine being told that your API is down by your biggest partner. Not the best feeling, right? Defining metrics and alerts that indicate if your system is up and running will help.
Find the right measure to determine if your API is online and performing normally. Alert the right contact points (both internally and externally ) as soon as something is off. Assess the risks and have action plans ready when risks become real.
Measure your API product
Who is using your API, and how? Are your efforts going to the right product features? Do you get many occurrences of the same support question?
While your API might be technically ok, you need ways to measure your product usage. Tracking errors, usage and behavior can surface problems, cost savings or opportunities.
A recurrent error is a sign of a problem with a root cause. This could be caused by the API documentation not being clear enough or has errors. You may have features you were going to refactor, but they are barely used.
Measuring API usage can give you valuable data for improvement and growth.
Analyze for opportunities and change
Are you on track with my business plan? Are the assumptions right?
Looking at the metrics and KPIs, you can iterate on the API value proposition canvas and business model. What new assumptions are the numbers telling you? What new APIs do you need?
Is the minimum viable architecture enough anymore? Is your developer experience cutting it anymore? Are your API consumers able to discover your APIs? A lot of opportunities to fix, test, learn and grow in the next phase.
There are the typical dashboards and measures used for measuring business and technical performance and developer satisfaction for APIs. Depending on the API management platform used, there are analytics dashboards available in the Developer portal for API consumers and in the API management portal for API Providers. In most API management platforms, there is a way to export in real-time or manually the data to BI- or log analytics tools or any platform using APIs.
What should you measure?
Typical APIOps Dashboards
- Business performance
- API Consumer dashboard
- API Provider dashboard
- Change events (deployments and infrastructure changes) dashboard
- Alerts dashboard
Some example KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
- Revenue (MRR) generated by APIs
- Other added value generated by APIs; additional sales, aqcuisitions, TCV and other customer lifetime value metrics, NPS
- API management recurring costs
- API management licensing and maintanance costs
- API management infrastructure costs; cloud, on-premise (if needed)
- APIOps costs; development of new and existing APIs, monitoring and maintaining APIs, API runtime environment costs (cloud or on-premise)
method for lean api development
Great APIs need skilled people and a good method, which let's you create APIs as products - fast.
APIOps Cycles method is vendor & technology-neutral.
Read the free e-book "The 8 wastes of lean in API development". Learn quick tips on how to remove the wastes using the APIOps Cycles method.
