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In today’s world, APIs have definitely advanced the way how applications communicate with each other. However, when several APIs are utilized in a business scenario, it would be challenging to retain insight into each API to make sure they work as intended.
This is where an Azure service like API Management turns out to be a significant aspect. It offers a centralized interface to publish, transform and manage numerous APIs, guaranteeing that they are secure and consumable.
Significance of Monitoring your Azure APIM
Since Azure APIM instances manage such business-critical APIs, monitoring them and their operations is crucial to better know their health and efficiency. Here are the top benefits that can be achieved with Azure APIM Monitoring,
- Eliminate Bottlenecks:?Monitoring how your APIM APIs and Products (group of one or more APIs) perform is essential to quickly spot problems that might adversely affect the end-user experience.
- Reduce latency gaps: API response time has a profound effect on the performance of an application. So with APIM monitoring, get to identify in case of response time delays, thereby eliminating latency gaps.
- Ensure availability: When there are any API-related issues, an effective APIM monitoring setup will send instant alerts, allowing you to take the required remedial actions.
- Detect failure anomalies: Rapidly figure out if there are outages or abnormal deviations like sudden rise in the rate of failed requests.
Understanding the importance, Azure itself offers its own suite of built-in tools for monitoring Azure APIM Instances.
Wide range of monitoring options available for Azure APIM
Native-Azure monitoring tools (Azure Monitor)
Azure Monitor is one of the primary built-in tools for monitoring Azure APIM instances. Basically, it enables the collection of metrics and logs from APIM, which can be further used for monitoring, visualizing, and alerting.
Capabilities
- Monitor your APIM Instances on metrics like capacity and request rate
- Set up alert rules based on metrics to get notified of critical issues
- Provides dashboards for visualizing monitoring metrics
- Get insights into the operations performed on your APIM Instances with Activity logs
- Integration with App Insights lets you know the dependencies between APIM instances and other services.
Moreover, Azure Monitor focuses more on reactive monitoring – you get to react only after an incident has occurred.
But when it comes to APIM monitoring, business tends to be more proactive, constantly attempting to spot and fix potential issues before they have an impact on end users.
The limitations in using Azure Monitor for APIM
- Azure Monitor allows you to configure only a limited number of metrics per alert rule
- Monitoring an APIM instance on various metrics demands configuring a number of alerts, resulting in a cost spike.
- No consolidated error reporting for multiple APIM instances
- Doesn’t support visualizing how an API call traverses through various Azure services
- It would be hard to perform root cause analysis in case of a performance or latency issue without end-to-end tracing.
- Lack of automated features to execute remedial actions without manual intervention
This is where the necessity of having enterprise-grade monitoring tools comes in place. One such tool that can assist you in overcoming the above-listed drawbacks and help proactively monitor your Azure APIM is Serverless360.
How to be proactive and overcome limitations in Azure Monitor?
Serverless360 is an advanced cloud management platform that enables managing and monitoring different Azure services involved in your application from a unified view.
Considering APIs are critical in simplifying how an end user interacts with your application, Serverless360 offers out-of-the-box monitoring support for Azure APIM APIs, operations, and products.
Here is how Serverless360 can be extensively used for Azure APIM Monitoring.
Proactive monitoring for Azure APIM: Monitor all your APIM instances on multiple metrics and properties (Failed Requests, Successful Requests, etc) at no additional cost by setting up maximum thresholds to get an alert whenever there is a violation.
With this, get to overcome one of the major limitations in Azure Monitor – The restriction to monitor only countable metrics under a single alert.
Real-time consolidated error reports: In any sort of traditional monitoring, error reports will be generated for each APIM API, operation, or product, making it very difficult to identify the root cause of an issue.
But Serverless360 can mitigate the challenge by sending you a consolidated report on all the APIM Instances at desired time intervals, eliminating false or alert storms.
Discover failure trends: Serverless360 offers customizable, plug-and-play dashboards to provide a unified view of the metrics monitored. For instance, Visualize business-centric metrics like the response rates of APIs in a single place to avoid latency issues.
End-to-end tracking: An Azure application will have various Azure services along with other APIM Instances, so tracking how an API call flows through each of those services is required to perform root cause analysis and troubleshoot issues faster than ever.
App Insights in Azure Monitor just lets you visualize how services interact with each other whereas Serverless360 supports end-to-end tracking along with dependency mapping.
Auto-correct the status of APIM Products: Automation is very crucial to reduce the manual workload involved in resolving recurring incidents.
Serverless360 offers unique functionality to monitor the status of APIM products and auto-correct them during unintended interruptions. Also, it lets you configure various automated actions to be triggered whenever there is a threshold violation.
Optimize costs associated with APIM Instances: Save time and cost by auto-generating documentation on your entire Azure environment/infrastructure. These documents help keep track of the costs associated with your APIM APIs, operations, and products. They enable you to compare the costs incurred across various time periods and to gain a full analysis of the expenditures made for each of those components.
No room for security breaches: Understanding the importance of governance and auditing in enhancing security, Serverless360 comes with features to audit every action performed on your APIM instances and enable advanced role-based access control.
Decode App Insights and Log Analytics: Enabling App Insights and Log Analytics can derive useful data on the APIM performance, however, Serverless360 can make this information more usable to the support team. Refer to this blog to learn more: Serverless360 to enable your Security Manager to Azure WAF data
Offload support: Serverless360 offers an operation-friendly interface simple and straightforward for support users to infer the status of the resource and remediate identified issues. This can facilitate offloading support from the Azure team allowing them to innovate in business.
Conclusion
Having a solid tool for Azure APIM monitoring is mandatory for any organization, as the failure of an API could result in critical performance issues for the whole application.
But there are plenty of choices available for Azure APIM monitoring and it is important that you choose the most apt one for your business. Thus, this blog discusses the features of native-Azure monitoring tools, their drawbacks, and a solution (Serverless360) to overcome them with consolidated monitoring for Azure APIM APIs, Products, and Operations.
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