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.

When you set out to build your first API, it can very well be that you are either overwhelmed or forget essential points. The ecosystem for API tools is vast, and it’s vital to get the right tool for every phase of your project. In this article, we will go through the different phases an API project usually has. For every phase, I will list the significant points and tools that help there.

For any API-first company, implementing the right API analytics platform is critical for tracking the utilization of your APIs and to discover any performance or functional issues that may be impacting customers. There are a variety of open-source projects you can leverage to build a complete API analytics platform. Before jumping into building an API analytics solution yourself, you should first list out your requirements and use cases.

Making your company successful hinges on your customers being able to stand your product up, and gain value from it. When you’re using inbound marketing to drive customer acquisition, email doesn’t have to be relegated to second-class citizen status. We argue that email is one of the most powerful channels of communication between B2B companies and their customers.

Kong is a highly recommended API Gateway for any team looking for a reliable and scalable way to provide APIs. Compared to more traditional players like Apigee and Mulesoft, Kong follows an open-core model and is highly modular. To best optimize your API performance and understand what changes are needed to recoup your investment, it’s recommend to set up API monitoring and analytics.