Viewing analytics- Digital Transformation with IBM API Connect

There are several locations where you can view analytics using the API Connect management and portal interfaces. What if your company utilizes a different tool to report analytics, such as Splunk? API Connect allows you to download the analytics information to your own servers to use alternative tools to render them. We won’t cover that in this chapter, but you should be aware that the capability exists.

The first place you can review analytics is within a Catalog. You log on to the API Manager and select Manage to see your Catalogs. Once you choose a Catalog, you then click on the Analytics tab as shown in Figure 15.14. If your Analytics tab is not enabled, it is because the associated Gateway for the Catalog has not been associated with an Analytics service.

Figure 15.14 – Analytics default dashboards

The dashboards you see in Figure 15.14 are the default dashboards provided by API Connect. A dashboard is a view of a comprised list of visualizations. Visualizations are the metrics rendered in various graphs and charts that you define. You will learn this in the Creating visualization and dashboard section later in the chapter. Dashboards can also be customized to contain relevant visualization.

You will also find Analytics under Spaces if you have created Spaces within a Catalog. The view is identical to Figure 15.14. You learned about Spaces in Chapter 3, Setting Up and Getting Organized.

The other place you can review analytics is within the Developer Portal. You may notice in Figure 15.14 that there is a Portal default dashboard. This default out-of-the-box dashboard contains relevant information for the API consumers. As a consumer, you find those analytics under the Applications link on the portal. Figure 15.15 shows the default dashboard for the portal:

Figure 15.15 – Developer portal default analytics view

A consumer who has created an application with your APIs will be interested, for example, in various API statistics organized by time periods, total API Stats, Total Errors, and Average Response Time. You can see them in Figure 15.15 as numbered items 1 through 3.

It should be noted that the consumer cannot create their own dashboards but they can request that the portal dashboard be customized by someone within the provider organization.

You now know where to find the Analytics user interfaces in API Connect. It’s time to understand how analytics are organized. That organization is done with dashboards and you’ll learn that next.

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