User feedback

API consumers can provide something that you can’t get from anywhere else: their unbiased opinions about your API product. Whenever consumers find performance issues, errors, or inefficiencies, they are often the first to notice, making their feedback a valuable source of data for observability. Additionally, they can report issues that might not be immediately evident through any of the quantitative analyses you saw earlier in the chapter. Consumers, for example, are able to share problems that are related to usability and functional challenges.

How you gather feedback from users is a critical aspect of analyzing what they have to share. The mechanisms you use to let consumers share their feedback should be seamlessly integrated into your product or, even better, into consumers’ workflows. The first feedback channel you can think of is to open a direct way for reporting errors. To integrate that option into your API product, you can add information to...