apim
2020/09/08
 
8 Sep, 2020 | 3 min read

Introducing WSO2 API Manager Analytics 3.2

  • Amila De Silva
  • Software Architect - WSO2

Recording, monitoring, and presenting analytics has become a pivotal part of the decision-making process in today’s API-driven business space. Stakeholders need different views of the system to make the right decisions based on analytics. WSO2 API Manager Analytics presents statistics and analytics about API management in a user-friendly manner. This post discusses the latest features and improvements of the latest version: WSO2 API Manager Analytics 3.2.

Introduction

As APIs become an integral part of an enterprise's business strategy, efficient tools to monitor and derive business insights become an important aspect. These tools should provide the operational view of the APIs, which is crucial for the smooth functioning of APIs while providing easy access to business insights. In order to cater to these requirements broadly, with the 3.2 release of API Manager Analytics, we have introduced a host of features that helps organizations to:

  1. Glance over the operational status of the APIs
  2. Narrow down and isolate operational issues quickly
  3. Filter and explore business-related statistics intuitively

WSO2 API Manager Analytics captures data from WSO2 API Manager, which is an open-source, production-ready complete API management solution for managing the full lifecycle of an API. WSO2 API Manager Analytics processes, stores, and presents API-related data reported through different dashboards.

The following are the main highlights of the new release.

A Monitoring Dashboard to Provide Operational Statistics on APIs:

For an API-driven business, identifying operational issues and quickly resolving them are important for business continuity. To cater to this, we have introduced a new Monitoring Dashboard that provides an operational view of the APIs and intuitive ways to filter and isolate issues. The new Monitoring Dashboard hosts a host of new graphs and charts, such as Error Summary Over Time, Latency Over Time, and Alert Summary, which provide contextual insights about APIs.

The dashboard is composed of five pages: Overview, Error, Latency, Traffic, and Alerts. The Overview page shows four proxy metrics: Request Count, Error Count, Throttled Out Count, and Highest Latency, which provides a holistic view of the system in a single pane. When clicked on each, a detailed view of the metric is rendered on the respective Monitoring Page. Each page provides an over time variation of the respective metric, which provides a historic view of it and helps to identify trends. Depending on the context, each page provides different options to filter data and isolate issues.

For example, if the error count has been increasing over the past day, the Fault Summary Widget in the Overview page will indicate that; once clicked, a user is directed to the error page, where an error breakdown and an over-time variation of errors are shown.

Figure 1: The Monitoring Dashboard showing overall statistics for APIs

A New Dashboard for Business Analytics

For an API strategy to thrive, different stakeholders need to see different views of the system. API program managers, who are responsible for the overall success of the APIs strategy, need to derive insights by comparing different perspectives of the APIs. As managers, they should be able to see an unobstructed view of the APIs. In prior releases, a single dashboard showing API analytics was used both by publishers and program Managers, which limited the ability to cater to either user group properly. The new Business Analytics Dashboard was introduced to close this gap. The new dashboard provides statistics such as API usage, performance, throttle statistics, developer statistics, and many more, which were originally in the Publisher Dashboards. Several new widgets like Errors Over Time, Usage Over Time and Throttled requests over time help to identify seasonal patterns in data. These provide useful insights to perform capacity planning or time to upgrade business plans. Note that users need to have an internal/analytics role in order to view this dashboard.

The Publisher Dashboard has been renamed as API Analytics, now which only hosts a handful of widgets that are useful to a Publisher. Irrespective of whether the APIs are role-restricted or not, the Business Analytics Dashboard will show statistics for all APIs.

Figure 2: An example showing statistics for the past 30 days in the Overview page

New Dimension Selectors

Taking a step towards providing exploratory Analytics, a new Selector has been introduced to render the pages by API Providers and APIs. When a user needs to compare several APIs, for example, to see how one API is obtaining traffic compared to others, they can use the API selector to select the respective APIs, and all the charts on the page would render stats based on the selection. When a new version of the API has been launched, comparing it with the previous versions can give useful insights about the adoption of the new version.

The new Dimension selectors are available in both the Business Analytics and API Analytics Dashboards.

Figure 3: The new Dimension Selector

Improved Navigation among Charts and Graphs

While different charts and graphs help to reveal different facets of the API ecosystem, the more the different options are, the harder it is to locate and pick the most relevant view.

In version 3.1, charts were organized into different pages by their functionality. In the latest release, this has been pushed a step further by providing navigation between related charts. With the new version, users can start from the overview page by selecting a particular perspective and drill down into more detailed views to get finer details about the APIs. Navigations have been provided to follow the intuitive paths users likely take. For example, a Program manager can start from API Usage Summary box in the Overview page and follow the navigation to get an over time variation of the usage, and also select a single API to learn more about its behaviors.

Figure 4: Drilling down to more detailed views starting from the Overview page

Improvements in WSO2 API Manager Analytics 3.2

The new release brings a host of interactive charts, which allows users to control the scope of data and dive into specific areas. Charts and graphs that show composite views provide the ability to selectively enable relevant sections to make better comparisons. For example, The Error Summary Over Time chart shows the overall errors for an API. When a more detailed comparison is needed between two or more error types, the more prominent errors can be disabled to get a detailed comparison between the components needed. Identifying the need to export data into different tools, an option has been provided to export data as a CSV.

Figure 5: Interactively enabling and disabling different traffic components to perform a detailed comparison

Conclusion

In an API-driven business, monitoring and analytics play an important role. They provide operational insights to ensure the smooth functioning of APIs, which help to identify and steer the API strategy.

With the help of monitoring dashboards, combined with improved navigation capabilities, now DevOps can easily spot operational bottlenecks and narrow down the causes to ensure the uninterrupted functioning of the APIs. The new Business Analytics Dashboards and additions such as Dimension Selectors and interactive charts not only improve exploratory capabilities, they also help key decision-makers to drill into data and extract actionable insights.

We believe the new analytics release helps organizations to make better business decisions. If you are interested to find more, please refer to the official product documentation.

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