API Traffic Management 101

Chapter 6. Diagnosing and Automating Traffic

In this chapter, we’ll take what we’ve covered so far and use it to begin mapping out what you can do with your API traffic platform to help proactively support and enhance your company’s API ecosystem. Building on top of the level of API Traffic Management (see the lowest level of Figure 6-1), we dig into three additional topics:

• Supporting runtime experiments and the principles of Site Reliability Engineering and chaos engineering

• Adding the automation of traffic rules and metrics in testing, deployment, runtime

• Dealing with business goals through the use of OKRs

Figure 6-1. Aspects of diagnosing and automating API traffic

Business Metrics

Most of this book has focused on the network- and component-level aspects of monitoring and reporting system health. But that is just part of the story. It is also important to ensure that your API traffic platform can provide reliable monitoring and feedback on your key business goals and objectives. This focus at the overall business level can help your API program provide timely, real-time data on the company’s progress on key business metrics.

There’s an old adage by Steven A. Lowe: “You can measure almost anything but you can’t pay attention to everything.”

As you build up your API traffic practice, it’s important to identify the kinds of metrics that matter to your business, not ...