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Monitor your API Connect Developer Portal with Instana

By Chris Dudley posted Wed October 20, 2021 01:27 PM

  

Introduction

This post describes the benefits of monitoring the API Connect Developer Portal using the Instana End-User Monitoring (EUM) Drupal module.

Monitoring the ongoing performance of applications is essential to maintain the health of services. There is a great number of non-trivial issues involved in managing a big cloud application. Knowing when your website is performing as expected, healthy and error free is critical in ensuring a good hassle-free customer experience and detecting underlying problems fast and accurately to minimise loss.

However, monitoring is much more than just visualising performance, when done correctly. It can be built into automation to programatically scale services based on live user activity as well as help define patterns and build detailed usage profiles with high business value. An example of this kind of pattern would be a big number of developers viewing documentation about a particular API endpoint but not actually interacting with it as much as expected, which would be an indicator that something is wrong with that particular endpoint.

Introducing Instana EUM module

Instana is the first and only fully automated Application Performance Management (APM) solution designed specifically for the challenges of managing microservice and cloud-native applications. (https://www.instana.com/docs/)

Instana's JavaScript agent exposes an API which your website can interact with when the Instana EUM Drupal module is enabled. Consequently, data is collected from user interaction and is presented in an Instana dashboard in an observable way. This allows developers to observe important metrics such as response times, individual page popularity, JavaScript errors, geographical request locations and the total traffic received by the application.

This then has the potential to give developers insights into user behaviour and thus, may highlight the APIs that users are heavily reliant on. In addition, less popular APIs can also be outlined to show room for improvement and further implementation.


Configure the Instana EUM Module

When the plugin has been enabled, you are able to configure your portal to set the API Key and Reporting URL given by Instana in order to make calls to the monitoring instance. Developers are also able to state whether or not to track individual page traffic and the administration pages of the portal.



For more information, see the following links:

- https://github.com/ibm-apiconnect/devportal/tree/master/instana_eum
- https://www.instana.com/docs/website_monitoring/

Wrap up and conclusion

Data tracked via the front end of an application can be as useful as that of the back end and should not be overlooked. The Instana EUM Drupal module allows API Connect customers to gain a valuable insight into front-end user activity to substantially increase business value.


Authors

- Diogo Ramos
- Ollie Potter
- Pablo Lopez Rodriguez
- Yasmin Aumeeruddy



#APIConnect
#configure
#drupal
#EUM
#howto
#Instana
#monitoring
#observability
#setup

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