This guide walks you through how to stand up cross-platform analytics to track customer behavior across both your APIs and web apps. By tracking customer behavior on both APIs and web apps, you’re able to fully understand the customer journey and metrics like Time to First Hello World and Time to Value. However, gathering the data by itself isn’t enough. After all, if it’s not acted on, it’s not of much use.
Maintaining the performance and reliability of your API platform are two of the most important issues to ensure the continuing success of your product. APIs should run as efficiently as possible, and one way of safeguarding that is to rate limit, or constrain, the number of HTTP requests made in a given time period.
Automating repetitive processes is a key attribute in whole-product design. By combining payload observability with behavioral emails, Moesif is able to make you more productive through sophisticated workflows on many functional, performance and product issues. This article walks through how to set up playbooks that can save you time, resources and energy. We’ve highlighted a small number of key areas where our playbooks can assist you in the management of your product.
Behavioral email is automated and targeted messages sent to customers based on their actions or behavior. By triggering on how your customers interact with your website or product, you’re able to send email whose content is actually aligned with what they’re doing, and will therefore be far more likely to resonate.
The traditional definition of API monitoring has been around for years from companies like SmartBear, APIMetrics, and Runscope and useful to check API correctness and performance. An API monitoring tool initiates API calls against your chosen endpoints and then records the response received. Additional checks can be added such as create a slack alert on a 500 error or timeout.
Double your open rate by using behavioral emails. The best way of engaging your customers is to share content that resonates. And nothing resonates more than sending targeted emails to developers based on their own actions and behaviors. In a companion blog post, Behavioral Email Speeds API Integration, we explained how behaviorally-driven outreach to developers can speed API integration for an API product company.
Kibana and the rest of the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash) is great for parsing and visualizing API logs for a variety of use cases. As an open-source project, it’s free to get started (you need to still factor in any compute and storage cost which is not cheap for analytics).
Behavioral email is the keystone of user-centric platform integration — emails to developers are most effective when they’re based on how they used your platform. Not surprisingly, the concept of segmenting your customers into groups of similar behaviors or attitudes is a well established best practice in marketing. MarketSherpa’s survey found that one of the most effective marketing strategies is to send emails based on the behavior of your customers.
As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.
We interviewed the product managers at a number of the larger API-first companies that are based in San Francisco. The companies are all publicly traded, have TTM revenue of more than $100M and are in the fields of billing, security, communications and workflow automation. The PMs were asked what were their favorite tools and what API metrics they cared most about.
