New Enhancements to Konnect to Fuel API-Driven Innovation

APIs are the lifeblood of disruption . . . when leveraged correctly. The best, most disruptive businesses are able to harness API growth as a strategic opportunity. But how? With an API platform that drives innovation, faster delivery, and top-tier customer experiences alongside a top-notch developer experience.

To that end, the Kong Konnect team has been busy executing against these goals in the new year. We’ve been hyper-focused on fortifying Konnect with capabilities that give you maximum operational flexibility and ease of use across API discovery and governance, observability, and consumer management — so your developers can focus on the core tasks that drive the most business impact. 

Read on to learn what’s new in Konnect!

Improved API discovery and governance capabilities

Konnect Service Catalog: Scorecards

Last September, we launched Kong Konnect Service Catalog in public beta. The Service Catalog in Konnect serves as a central repository for an organization’s APIs and services. Service owners, application teams, and platform teams use it to better discover and govern the APIs and services running internally in their organization. Let’s dive into how Service Catalog can help your platform team.

As platform teams gain increasing control over API and service governance in their organizations’ API platforms, their responsibilities in this regard become two-fold: 1) maintaining visibility into the API and service ecosystem, and 2) setting up and enforcing standards and tracking compliance to those standards.

To help platform teams drive successful platform governance, we’ve released a new feature called Scorecards in Service Catalog. Scorecards give platform teams the ability to measure and enforce guardrails on internal services to help drive governance initiatives tied to security, reliability, performance, and quality. With Scorecards, platform teams can ensure that:

• Ownership is well-defined
• Documentation best practices are adhered to
• DORA metrics are tracked (used to assess the performance of software development teams)
• And more!

Scorecards enhance your organization's security and governance posture without compromising on Engineering speed or release timelines.

Check out the Scorecards demo below to see them in action.

Konnect Service Catalog: 360 Service Visibility

Service owners and application teams waste a lot of time tracking down critical information about a service across various developer toolchains, triggering unnecessary cognitive load and slowing down their productivity. To help developers self-service the information they need and unblock development progress, Service Catalog aggregates critical information across third-party systems to provide an up-to-date 360-degree view of each registered service in one place. This includes necessary information like code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, on-call rotations, and more.

Since Service Catalog was released in beta, we’ve been enriching this feature with Konnect-specific and third-party integrations that unlock the following capabilities: 

• View API specs of corresponding services from GitHub, GitLab, and SwaggerHub
• View the statuses of your Datadog Monitors and quickly jump to corresponding Datadog Dashboards directly from Service Catalog
• View the API gateways fronting a specific service, as well as any service meshes in which they belong

• View a chronological list of events affecting your services in the Events tab of a service, including:

  • GitHub events for pull request activity
  • PagerDuty for whenever an incident is opened/acknowledged/closed
  • Gateway Manager for whenever plugins are installed or removed
  • Datadog for whenever monitors change status from alert/warn/OK
• Have a centralized and reliable way to contact service teams by mapping Slack channels to individual services 

New Konnect Developer Portal

If you want to surface the right APIs to tailored consumer audiences, you need a developer portal. For organizations looking to productize their APIs, a developer portal is critical to facilitating API adoption. And while they’ve historically served as the solution for API discovery and adoption, many solutions out there today are clunky and don’t step up to the needs of the modern developer experience. Poor DevEx means developers won’t use the portal to discover APIs or adopt them. This hampers their ability to innovate and deliver products quickly and the ROI from the portal itself. 

We’ve set out to change that with the public beta version of our newly reimagined Kong Konnect Developer Portal, which we built with a top-notch DevEx at its core. Read all about it in this blog post.

Enhanced platform-wide analytics to optimize your API performance and strategy

Actionable visibility into your API traffic 

Whether you’re a platform engineer, a developer, or an API product manager, if you’re responsible in any way for the day-to-day management of APIs, you likely want to understand all the activity happening at the gateway level, such as metrics around API usage, performance, and health. Having real-time, granular observability into your APIs allows you to pinpoint and resolve any issues quickly, so you can ensure optimal API performance and minimize service disruptions.

Since the analytics experience is well-embedded in Gateway Manager, Dev Portal, and Service Catalog, you automatically get high-level visualizations and charts of relevant API metrics in real time across the Konnect platform. To enhance the troubleshooting flow from these various parts of Konnect, we’ve improved the ability to explore these charts in deeper detail. 

Let’s say you’re looking at the API traffic status codes for a specific service in Gateway Manager. You notice a spike in 500s in the past hour and want to dig deeper to understand what’s happening. To drill down further, you can now click the chart in question and be directed to the Analytics Explorer view with the chart’s data and context preserved. 

This “Jump to Explorer” ability extends to every live chart in Konnect and allows you to drill down into information, investigate anomalies, and understand impact in a streamlined way. 

Active Tracing

Now, let’s say you need to go even deeper than a chart. You want to pinpoint the root cause of a critical service malfunction — what’s causing the problem in the gateway? While collecting highly detailed telemetry data for all API traffic can be cost-prohibitive and challenging to implement, having a way to access a targeted slice of telemetry on-demand can prove extremely useful to platform teams for deeper understanding and rapid resolution.

For these types of focused troubleshooting scenarios, we’ve introduced a new feature called Active Tracing (currently in Tech Preview in Konnect). With Active Tracing, infrastructure administrators can generate a “deep tracing” session in targeted API gateway nodes, which then produces detailed traces for all requests matching the sampling criteria across the entire request/response lifecycle. You can view these traces directly in Konnect with a built-in span viewer. Read all about Active Tracing functionality in more detail in this blog post.

Cultivate a data-informed API strategy

Given the outsized impact APIs have on driving business value, we know how important it is for business stakeholders, typically non-technical users, to be able to access tailored API insights in order to make strategic decisions. With a user-friendly and intuitive UI, there is very little learning curve with Konnect Analytics, meaning users can self-service the insights they need for a specific service, route, or consumer with ease. 

However, every organization has different priorities, and within organizations, some teams focus on consumer impact and health, while others hone in on runtime performance. These teams want to pull together and correlate data most relevant to their focus in a single dashboard, but the built-in dashboards in Konnect may not be the exact datasets most helpful to their cause. 

We’re pumped to announce a brand-new feature in Analytics called Custom Dashboards (in tech preview) that allows users to build fully customized dashboards to consolidate key data in a single page and uncover relationships between data points. (Note that in order to start using the Custom Dashboards feature, you'll need to enable it via Konnect Labs.)  

With Custom Dashboards, users can consolidate key metrics, usage trends, and error reports into a single dashboard for faster and more efficient decision-making. Custom dashboards are a great starting point for facilitating better communication around API strategy with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Check out the Custom Dashboards demo below to learn more.

Reduced operational overhead with streamlined consumer management

Through customer feedback, we discovered that defining and managing consumers on the control plane level in Konnect Gateway Manager caused a high operational burden on our users. Since consumers were tied to individual control planes, developers would replicate consumer configurations across various control planes, leading to duplicative work and higher operational overhead in managing any config changes.

To alleviate this burden, we released a feature last September in tech preview that allows you to centrally define and manage consumers at the Konnect region level (i.e., above the control plane scope). We're excited to announce that this feature is now GA, and Konnect customers can start using it for production workloads with Kong Gateway 3.10 via API (UI in Konnect coming soon). 

Here’s how we’ve improved consumer management in Konnect:

• A consumer’s identity is defined once and can be referenced across multiple control planes in a Konnect region.
• Updating a consumer’s configuration only needs to be done once — the updated config can then be referenced by relevant control planes.
• Consumer data is stored centrally in an external database to ensure adherence to data residency requirements.  
• Consumer data defined or reconfigured at the region level will no longer be sent as part of the configuration data to a data plane, improving the gateway’s overall performance by reducing latency.
• Instead, upon a request, your data planes will fetch consumer information in real-time from the identity database and cache it locally for optimal performance.
• Consumers currently come with support for the Key Auth plugin (with support for additional consumer authentication plugins coming soon).

Rest assured that your Kong gateways are always up-to-date with the latest consumer config data, all while saving time and effort for the work that drives your business forward. Learn more about the API in docs.

Maximize and future-proof your API program with one API platform 

With Kong Konnect, you can take care of all your API and connectivity use cases in one consolidated and cost-efficient platform while ensuring you can support future API strategies.

Log in or register for Konnect to get started, and learn more about Kong Konnect here.