API products are a collection of API resources that include metadata and quota controls that you may use to offer your developer community productized and specialized API bundles. Without additional setup or coding, API products give you the flexibility to repackage APIs dynamically. API-driven enterprises may examine more than just engineering metrics like failures and latency thanks to API product metrics.
Important API metrics offer insight into the efficiency with which your application is used. It is beneficial to keep track of the data across longer time periods because they are helpful in comparing websites. This article covers 10 API Product Metrics that could be useful for a Platform Team.
Table of Contents
1. Why is Time to First Hello World (TTFHW) a crucial metric?
TTFHW is a crucial KPI for monitoring the overall developer experience, as well as the health of your API product. TTFHW calculates the time delay between a user’s initial visit to the landing page and the MVP integration’s initial transaction via your API platform. This is a cross-functional statistic tracking system for marketing, guides, and APIs.
2. How is tracking top customers by API usage an asset for your company?
When it comes to knowing how your API usage and where upsell chances exist, monitoring the top API users can be a major advantage for any business with a specialization in B2B. Many seasoned product leaders are aware that many products display power-law dynamics, with a small number of power users using them disproportionately more than the average user. Unsurprisingly, these same power users are the ones who typically provide your business with the most income and organic referrals.
3. What do API product metrics have to do with SDKs?
Many API platform teams can also maintain SDKs and integrations. In contrast to mobile, where iOS and Android are the only two main operating systems, there may be hundreds of SDKs. When introducing new features, this may turn into a maintenance nightmare.
When deciding which endpoints and functionality to deprecate, monitoring the API or SDK version is crucial. Without first asking them why they use it, you wouldn’t want to phase out the endpoint that your biggest paying client uses.
4. Why is it important to track unique API consumers?
It’s crucial to track API MAU, monthly active users, or unique users of an API, because a month’s rise in API consumption may be ascribed to just one customer account. You can determine the overall quality of new client acquisition and growth using this statistic. To obtain a complete picture of a product’s health, most API platform teams compare API MAU to its web MAU.
If online MAU growth is outpacing API MAU growth, a faulty funnel during integration or the deployment of a new solution may be the cause. This is particularly true for businesses whose primary offering is an API, as is the case for many B2B businesses. In contrast, it is possible to link API MAU with API consumption to determine the source of the increased API utilization.
5. How do API calls per business transaction indicate if an API fails?
The number of calls per business transaction should be kept as low as possible. This applies even when more is better for many products and company KPIs. This measure accurately depicts how the API was created. It may indicate that the API is missing the proper endpoints available if a new user has to make three separate calls to piece the data together. Instead of only considering features and endpoints, it’s critical when building an API to consider a business transaction or what a customer is attempting to accomplish. It can also indicate that your API lacks sufficient filtering and pagination flexibility.
6. What does API retention mean for an API’s value?
A product that has a high rate of product retention is more likely to have product-market fit than one that has a turnover problem. Product retention, unlike subscription retention, monitors API consumption.
Despite being connected, the two are distinct from one another. Generally, product turnover is a precursor to subscription turnover. This is because users who don’t see the value in an API may well be stuck into an annual contract, even if they aren’t utilizing it.
7. Is high requests per minute one of the API product metrics?
Request Per Minute is a performance statistic that measures the number of queries your API can handle per minute. The average number of requests, or RPM, might change.
Despite the fact that some people enjoy boasting about their high RPM, a technical team’s objective must be efficiency and a reduction in this number. It is possible to decrease this amount by condensing some business operations that involve numerous API calls into fewer API calls. Along with making sure you have a dynamic pagination strategy, popular types like batching many queries into one query can be very helpful.
8. Do platform teams care about API usage growth?
Many product owners use API usage and the number of unique customers as key API metrics to gauge API adoption. Not only should an API be error-free, but it should also get better every month. In contrast to RPM, one should measure API usage over longer time frames to identify true trends.
9. What do average and max latency measure?
The latency of an API is one of the most crucial metrics to monitor the client experience. While a rise in infrastructure-level performance indicators, like CPU usage and memory usage, may not always be correlated with a decrease in user perception of responsiveness, API latency almost always is. It’s possible that tracking delay by itself won’t fully explain why an increase happened. To identify the underlying cause of the rise in latency, it’s critical to keep track of all changes made to your APIs. This includes new API versions issued, new endpoints added, schema modifications, and more.
It’s crucial to examine latency breakdowns by route, area, and other factors to a segment, just because problematic slow endpoints may go undetected while merely considering aggregate latency.
10. How does measuring errors per minute benefit your API?
Errors per minute, often known as error rate, is a crucial metric for gauging how error-prone and buggy your API is. It tracks the number of API calls each minute that do not return 200 groups of status codes. It’s critical to comprehend the types of faults occurring in order to measure errors per minute. While multiple 400 errors could indicate a user mistake from a poorly built or written API, 500 errors could indicate something is wrong with your code. This means it’s crucial to use the correct HTTP status code while creating your API.
What Makes APILayer APIs Useful?
Despite the difficulties in API monitoring metrics, businesses are adopting and even re-engineering infrastructure API metrics to meet customer expectations as infrastructure consumption rises. The focus on users is a feature shared by all the top programming interfaces to date.
Anyone who creates and uses APIs must keep track of the pertinent API metrics. APILayer is a marketplace where companies, independent software developers, and the APILayer team can sell APIs. The APIs are thoroughly inspected and have an on-demand SLA before we can even see them.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What are API metrics?
Application API metrics offer insight into the efficiency with which your application is used.
What are KPIs for APIs?
Your chances of successfully managing your API KPIs for performance gains increase as you measure them more precisely.
How do I track API performance?
The two main techniques for monitoring APIs are real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring.
What are the 4 types of API?
Web APIs can be classified into four categories: open APIs, partner APIs, internal APIs, and composite APIs.
