Introducing API Metrics

Ehsan Mafi -

You've spent lots of time documenting your API so that more people can use it successfully. Excellent!

Is it working? Can you tell...

  • Who is using your API?
  • How much they're using it?
  • If they're having success with your API?
  • If they're having trouble?

What if you could easily identify prospects that use your API the most, and have your sales team reach out to them? Or what if you could empower your support team with detailed context for customers having trouble with using your API?

Today we are proud to offer API Metrics, a new product from ReadMe that enables you, and your customers, to gain more insight into their interactions with your API.

There are two main components to API Metrics:

  1. The Dashboard
  2. The Customer Facing Logs

API Metrics Dashboard

The dashboard gives any Admin in your ReadMe project the ability to segment your APIs logs by status code, endpoint, method, project or any combination of those four filters.

There are three sections of the dashboard:

  1. Search/Filter Bar
  2. Overview Cards
  3. Detailed Logs

Search/Filter Bar


Select one or any combination of the following categories to segment the logs.

  • Status Code
  • Endpoint URL
  • Method (Get, Put, Post, Delete)
  • Project

To use search, first select the category and then type in the search term. The results of the filtered segment will appear in the overview cards and detailed log.

Overview Cards


The three cards display the following information based on the filtered segment:

  1. Top Metrics Projects and Endpoints with the highest log count
  2. Status Codes Pie chart of status codes and quantity on mouse hover.
  3. Usage Metrics Total Calls, Total Projects, Average Response Time, Average Calls Per Project
Why is this helpful?

Who are our most active and inactive customers? What are our most used/unused endpoints? Be proactive and reach out to prospects who frequently and successfully use your API. Or reach out to customers who are experiencing lots of error codes before they even contact you!

Detailed Log

Based on the filtered segment, view every call made to your API by:

  • Method
  • Status
  • URL
  • Project
  • User Agent
  • Timestamp

Starting with the most recent call. Then select any individual call to display:

  • Request Header
  • Response Header
  • Response Body
Why is this helpful?

This makes it much so easier to troubleshoot API issues: See exactly what customers send you and what you're sending back.

Customer Facing Logs

For authenticated users, API Metrics will display their filterable logs right inside your documentation in a new section called API Logs

This includes all interactions made with your API, not just the ones made inside ReadMe.

Once you send API logs to ReadMe, you will need to set up authentication to give your customers the ability to see their historical log of interaction with your API.

Logs at each endpoint

For more granularity, the logs also display per endpoint in the API Reference section

Why is this helpful?

If a customer has an issue with a particular endpoint, now they can see what has worked in the past and self-diagnose!

Get Started

After you define your API in ReadMe (manually or via Swagger/OAS spec file) you will be prompted to set up API Metrics in either Node at the application level or CloudFlare at the CDN level.

If your application is not written in Node and you don't use CloudFlare as a CDN but still want to use API Metrics, let us know what language/platform you would like to see supported!

FAQ

Where do I set this up in ReadMe?

You'll be prompted to configure API Metrics after define your API (manually or via Swagger/OAS spec file) in ReadMe under APIs > Add more endpoints.

Learn how to send your API logs to ReadMe

How much does this cost?

API Metrics is free for the the first 10,000 logs per month!

Access up to 500,000 logs per month for $200/month.
Access up to 1,000,000 logs per month for $400/month.

To access more than 1 million logs per month talk to us! growth@readme.io

What if I have multiple APIs in a single project?

The logs from all of your APIs will come into the API Metrics Dashboard.

What if I have more questions?

Contact us! support@readme.io