APIs are the backbone of the modern enterprise. However, troubleshooting API errors and resolving issues quickly can be challenging given their role in application operational continuity and customer experience. Time-sensitive resolution demands monitoring and deep analytical insights into API performance and usage. Combining both these capabilities in one tool accelerates real-time resolution and empowers stakeholders to surface business-critical API performance metrics through a self-service motion.
Today, Kong announces the general availability of Advanced Analytics in the Kong Konnect API platform. Advanced Analytics is designed to simplify and accelerate the way businesses gain visibility into their API ecosystems and take action. Advanced Analytics leverages the power of Kong's unified API platform and the access to comprehensive data it has to provide context-rich, real-time analytics for swift issue resolution and insights to drive business strategy.
Developing comprehensive insights into your API ecosystem has traditionally been fraught with challenges: the high costs and effort of deploying a homegrown observability stack, the siloed data across multiple monitoring tools, and the barriers to accessing live API performance data. Advanced Analytics in Konnect is designed to address these pain points, offering a cost-effective, efficient solution optimized for Kong’s runtimes.
Our objective with Konnect Advanced Analytics is to democratize access to important API usage and performance data as the starting point for investigative efforts by both business users and platform and application teams. In order to do that, we have placed special emphasis on making the Advanced Analytics interface be both user-friendly and intuitive.
With Advanced Analytics, business users can get an in-depth understanding of APIs and the impact they have on customer experience — and the overall success of the business. These users no longer have to ask the platform teams to generate API performance and consumption reports and wait for them to be produced to take action. Instead, they can produce reports on their own without disrupting the primary tasks of the platform team — and answer any subsequent ad-hoc questions that come to mind after their first request has been fulfilled.
Figure 1: API performance based on request count by gateway services and status code.
For platform and application teams, Advanced Analytics can also serve as a starting point for investigating and troubleshooting issues and bottlenecks. An API performance investigation usually starts by comparing the latency between the gateway and the upstream systems to determine if it's a platform or an upstream service issue. Next, you would identify where to look for the service responsible for the latency and the team responsible for it so that the issue can be resolved as soon as possible. The answers to all these and more in-depth questions are now at the fingertips of the platform and application teams with Advanced Analytics.
Figure 2: Service health of all services in production.
Advanced Analytics provides in-depth visibility across your entire API ecosystem from a single vantage point. This unified approach simplifies the process of monitoring and empowers teams to resolve issues in a proactive, accelerated manner.
Advanced Analytics is the starting point for your issue resolution process. It provides a comprehensive view of API performance metrics across business-critical dimensions with high cardinality for 14 months. Armed with this contextual information, teams can identify emerging trends and adjust strategies accordingly to deliver higher performance, reducing future effort and costs.
What sets Advanced Analytics apart is its ability to provide contextual insights into specific applications and user behaviors, based on a wide array of existing Konnect objects. For platform teams, this means an in-depth understanding of API performance issues and a singular starting point to begin their investigative process for swift debugging and troubleshooting. Whether drilling down into API request records or generating custom reports to address your specific use case, Advanced Analytics ensures that insights are not just data points, but actionable intelligence tailored to your specific service, route, or consumer needs.
Figure 3: API requests by timestamp and latency.
Here are a few examples of the types of questions Advanced Analytics can answer:
Every second counts. And when your API services are down, Advanced Analytics delivers real-time API insights in sub-seconds. This unparalleled speed empowers application and platform teams to address issues and restore applications faster. Coupled with custom reporting and self-service capabilities, Advanced Analytics ensures that your time to insight — and consequently, time to recovery — is minimized, keeping your operations running smoothly without disruption.
Figure 4: API usage trend by request count.
While this release focuses on enhancing API monitoring capabilities, our vision for Advanced Analytics encompasses a broader spectrum of API analytics. Future releases will provide a deeper understanding of user behavior, traffic patterns, and the business impact of APIs.
By transitioning from operational monitoring to comprehensive analytics, Kong is committed to empowering organizations to optimize their API designs, prioritize feature development, and truly measure the ROI of their API initiatives.
With the launch of Advanced Analytics in Konnect, Kong reaffirms its dedication to providing innovative solutions that meet the demands of API management and anticipate the future needs of digital enterprises. By leveraging Advanced Analytics, consumer-oriented companies can overcome the challenges associated with monitoring API ecosystems and turn insights into opportunities for growth and innovation.
To experience the insights delivered by Kong Konnect Advanced Analytics go to Kong Konnect Plus.
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