[Developer Day] Developer Experience in Practice: Developer Portal, Observability & Identity with Kong Konnect

This hands-on Developer Day builds on the first two workshops (Platform setup and APIOps automation) to deliver a complete developer experience. You’ll stand up a Kong Konnect Developer Portal with self-registration and application onboarding, wire the portal to an OIDC identity provider for SSO and token issuance, and publish APIs and docs from your APIOps pipeline. In parallel, you’ll assemble an observability stack with Grafana, connecting metrics, logs, and traces from Kong gateways and backend services to create actionable dashboards and alerts. By the end, platform teams will have clear guardrails and automation, while API and app teams get a governed, self-service path from discovery to secure consumption—backed by meaningful telemetry.

Key Takeaways

• Configure the Konnect Developer Portal with self-registration, app credentials, and approval workflows.
• Integrate an OIDC IdP for SSO, role mapping, and token issuance for portal users and applications.
• Automate API and documentation publishing to the portal from your APIOps (GitOps/CI) pipeline.
• Export gateway metrics/logs/traces and build Grafana dashboards for health, latency, error rates, and usage.
• Define SLOs and alerts to turn observability into operational action.
• Split responsibilities: platform teams provide guardrails and automation; API teams manage products and docs; app teams self-serve access.
• Produce a reusable reference implementation you can adapt to your organization’s environment.