If you've ever wondered how your API portfolio has changed over the past year—which APIs gained traction, which ones faded away, or how consumer adoption patterns shifted—you're not alone.
Understanding API evolution is critical for platform strategy. But tracking these changes manually across multiple time periods can be time-consuming and error-prone. You need to compare historical snapshots, identify patterns, and understand what those shifts mean for your API program.
That's why we're introducing the Usage Evolution Report in IBM API Connect v12.1.1.0.
The Usage Evolution Report is designed to help API providers visualize and understand how their API ecosystem has transformed over time. Instead of viewing isolated snapshots, users can now see the complete journey of their APIs, products, applications, plans and consumer organizations across multiple time periods in a single, intuitive visualization.
What the Usage Evolution Report Does
At its core, the Usage Evolution Report helps you understand the lifecycle and adoption patterns of your API ecosystem.
The report uses an innovative multi-stage Sankey diagram that shows how different entities flow through time—from 12 months ago, through 9 months, 6 months, 3 months, and up to the present day. This visualization makes it immediately clear which entities have sustained usage, which have declined, and which are newly emerging.
Users can track several types of entities:
- APIs: See which APIs maintain consistent usage and which are being deprecated or newly adopted
- Products: Monitor product lifecycle and understand which API products drive the most value
- Plans: Track plan adoption patterns and identify which pricing or access tiers resonate with consumers
- Applications: Follow application lifecycle from creation through active use or retirement
- Consumer Organizations: Understand how your consumer base evolves and which organizations remain engaged
The report surfaces several types of insights, including:
- Continuity patterns that show which entities maintain consistent usage across all time periods
- Adoption trends that highlight newly emerging APIs, products, or applications
- Deprecation signals that identify entities losing traction over time
- Volume changes that quantify the magnitude of usage shifts between periods
Where Usage Evolution is Available
The Usage Evolution Report is integrated into the analytics reporting experience within IBM API Connect.
It is available for multiple entity types:
- API Usage Evolution: Track how specific APIs gain or lose adoption over time
- Product Evolution: Monitor which API products maintain market fit
- Plan Evolution: Understand shifts in plan subscriptions and pricing tier adoption
- Application Evolution: Track application lifecycle and usage patterns
- Consumer Organization Evolution: Understand shifts in your consumer base
The report can be scoped to specific organizational contexts:
- Provider organization level
- Catalog level
- Space level (when applicable)
Each view provides the same powerful multi-stage visualization, adapted to show the relevant entities for that scope.
Why This Matters
The biggest benefit is strategic visibility.
When managing an API program, understanding historical trends is just as important as monitoring current metrics. The Usage Evolution Report helps answer critical questions:
- Are our APIs gaining or losing adoption?
- Which products are most successful over time?
- Are consumers moving to higher-tier plans or downgrading?
- Which consumer organizations are most engaged over time?
- Is our application portfolio growing or consolidating?
- What's the retention rate for our API consumers?
It also makes portfolio management more data-driven. Rather than relying on anecdotal evidence or manual tracking, API product managers can see clear visual evidence of adoption patterns. This helps teams make informed decisions about which APIs to invest in, which products to enhance, which plans to promote, and where to focus developer outreach efforts.
Just as importantly, the report helps make API governance more proactive. By identifying APIs or products with declining usage early, teams can investigate root causes—whether it's technical issues, better alternatives, or changing business needs—and take corrective action before complete deprecation becomes necessary.
How It Works: The Multi-Stage Visualization
One of the strengths of the Usage Evolution Report is its innovative visualization approach.
The report uses a multi-stage Sankey diagram that shows flows between consecutive time periods. Each "node" represents an entity (API, product, plan, application, consumer org) at a specific point in time, and the "flows" between nodes show how usage volume carries forward or changes.
For example, if "Payment API v2.0" had 10,000 calls 12 months ago and 15,000 calls 9 months ago, you'll see a flow connecting these two nodes with the appropriate width representing the volume. If the API disappears in a later period, the flow will terminate, making deprecation visually obvious.
The visualization handles three key scenarios:
- Sustained entities: APIs, products, or applications that appear in multiple consecutive periods show continuous flows, making it easy to identify your stable, core offerings
- New entities: When an API, product, or application appears for the first time, it emerges as a new flow, highlighting adoption of new capabilities
- Deprecated entities: When an entity stops appearing, its flow terminates, clearly showing when and where deprecation occurred
Built for Real-World API Programs
The Usage Evolution Report is designed with practical API management needs in mind.
It handles the complexity of real-world API portfolios where:
- APIs are versioned and both old and new versions may coexist
- Products bundle multiple APIs with different lifecycle stages
- Plans evolve with changing business models
- Applications may be created, used heavily, then retired
- Consumer organizations may shift their integration patterns over time
- Usage volumes vary significantly between entities
The report automatically identifies the top entities by usage volume in each period, ensuring the visualization remains focused on the most impactful parts of your API ecosystem. This prevents the chart from becoming cluttered while still capturing the entities that matter most to your business.
The multi-period view (12m → 9m → 6m → 3m → Now) provides enough historical depth to identify genuine trends while remaining comprehensible. This quarterly cadence aligns well with typical business planning cycles and API roadmap reviews.
A Better Way to Understand API Evolution
The Usage Evolution Report is about making API portfolio management feel more strategic and less reactive.
It helps teams understand API adoption patterns more quickly, spot important shifts more easily, and make decisions with more confidence. Whether you're reviewing your API catalog strategy, planning product enhancements, optimizing plan offerings, planning deprecations, or demonstrating the value of your API program to stakeholders, the Usage Evolution Report brings the story of your API ecosystem into clearer focus.
We're excited to bring the Usage Evolution Report to IBM API Connect and make it easier for teams to turn historical API data into strategic understanding.
Key Technical Features:
- Multi-stage Sankey diagram visualization showing 5 time periods
- Support for APIs, products, plans, applications and consumer organizations
- Automatic top-entity identification by usage volume
- Scoped views at organization, catalog, and space levels
- Internationalization support for global teams
- Integration with existing IBM API Connect analytics infrastructure