In v10.0.6, IBM API Connect added the ability for APIC Analytics to efficiently retain data over much longer periods and included the first of multiple reports in the UI. More information on this can be found here: Analytics Long Term Summary Data.
Building on the summary data feature, in v10.0.7, APIC Analytics is now aware of what isn’t being used, not just what is. It includes three new reports and new leaderboards in the UI based on this new ability.
Consumer trends report
The first of these new reports is the Consumer trends report which allows the API Provider to review long term trends in application count, subscription count and in API call volumes for consumer organizations and applications. The metrics show the long term trend over the specified time range for numbers of consumers, applications and subscriptions. There are charts showing total application and subscription numbers. It also shows leaderboards of the ten most and ten least active consumer organizations and applications – and a chart of total API calls and Response time percentiles can be seen for each of these.
The Consumer trends report allows Product Managers to see how successful their API platform is, and track how the number of subscriptions and applications is changing over time.
Inactive products report
This report shows products without subscriptions, products with no traffic, and products with no recent traffic. The report contains three tables listing these products. This report can be used to identify products which might need promoting or deprecating.
Published APIs have a maintenance and security responsibility. Removing unused products might lead to a slight performance improvement by reducing the complexity of the gateway routing algorithm.
This report highlights products that might want to be kept but need to be investigated to determine why they aren’t being used.
Inactive consumer organizations report
The final new report allows users to see detailed data about inactivity in consumer organizations by giving the percentage and number of consumer organizations with no applications, no subscriptions, no traffic and no recent traffic (in a specified time period). There is an activity funnel on the page showing the flow of these metrics, which at each level can be interacted with to show a table of the consumer organizations contained in it.
This report can be used to drive engagement. A consumer goes through several steps in order to call an API and make use of the data provided by it, and this report shows those who have not got past each of those steps. This new information allows the API Provider to engage with consumers and attempt to help them progress and make more use of the Provider’s APIs.
Leaderboards
There are now leaderboards of APIs, Products, Plans, Applications and Consumer organizations which show all of the given artifacts, ranked by number of API calls. The number of API calls is also split by successes and errors.
The entire datasets shown in these leaderboards can be downloaded as a single CSV from either the menu or inside the leaderboard.
A detailed report is available for every single item in these leaderboards. There are metrics on call volume and data received and sent, a chart showing call volume by successes and errors and a chart showing response time percentiles.
API Connect v10.0.7 is a CD (Continuous Delivery) release and so will only receive short term support with no fixpacks/fixes. It is not LTS (Long Term Support). It is not recommended to use CD releases in production. This capability will be available to try out in APIConnect on AWS SaaS very shortly. CD releases allow customers to try out new features and provide feedback to the development team to allow the shaping of new features before they are delivered in the next LTS release. As such, please let us know any feedback and feature requests.