Infrastructure Metrics

API producers build APIs for a number of customers, both internal and external. From a technical point of view, any API must meet certain engineering standards for your software architects to accept it. As we discussed in Chapter 3, engineering standards control how the APIs are built, tested, secured, and put into use. Once your APIs are in production, however, it is important to start monitoring their performance and usage.

In this chapter, you will learn how reliability is defined and how the reliability of APIs delivers value to customers. The topics we will be covering in this chapter include the following:

• Key success factors (KSFs) for APIs
• Infrastructure as the foundation for API analytics
• Performance metrics
• Usage metrics
• Reliability metrics

The first step in giving your users a high-quality experience is to have well-defined metrics for how your API works and how it is used.