How to monitor Azure API Management

As Microsoft says, “Monitoring is the act of collecting and analyzing data to determine the performance, health, and availability of your business application and the resources it depends on”.

An effective monitoring strategy will help you understand the detailed operation of the different components of your application and increase your up time by proactively notifying you of critical issues so that you can resolve them before they become problems.  Also, an effective strategy requires that the set-up and maintenance of the monitoring is automated, lightweight and does not require significant manual resources.

About Azure API Management

API Management (APIM) is a way to create consistent and modern API gateways for existing back-end services.

API Management helps organizations publish APIs to external, partner, and internal developers to unlock the potential of their data and services. Businesses everywhere are looking to extend their operations as a digital platform, creating new channels, finding new customers and driving deeper engagement with existing ones. API Management provides the core competencies to ensure a successful API program through developer engagement, business insights, analytics, security, and protection. You can use Azure API Management to take any backend and launch a full-fledged API program based on it.

To use API Management, administrators create APIs. Each API consists of one or more operations, and each API can be added to one or more products. To use an API, developers subscribe to a product that contains that API, and then they can call the API's operation, subject to any usage policies that may be in effect. Common scenarios include:

• Securing mobile infrastructure by gating access with API keys, preventing DOS attacks by using throttling, or using advanced security policies like JWT token validation.
• Enabling ISV partner ecosystems by offering fast partner onboarding through the developer portal and building an API facade to decouple from internal implementations that are not ripe for partner consumption.
• Running an internal API program by offering a centralized location for the organization to communicate about the availability and latest changes to APIs, gating access based on organizational accounts, all based on a secured channel between the API gateway and the backend.

Source: Microsoft

Why Monitor Azure API Management?

As explained above, Azure API Management is used as a key component in IT architectures that are business critical to drive productivity and revenues.  Often API management expose services to external parties - customers and partners - in automated supply chains or as marketplace platforms.

Due to the critical role API Management plays monitoring becomes important to ensure availability and performance.

Monitoring Azure with Azure's tooling is difficult

Monitoring in Azure is primarily provided by Azure Monitor which provides common stores for storing monitoring data, multiple data sources for collecting data from the different tiers supporting your application and features for analyzing and responding to collected data.

Monitoring Azure with Microsoft's built in tooling is difficult because:

1. The data is all over the place
2. Setting up monitoring and alerting is a manual job
3. Maintenance is time consuming
4. Relies mostly on traditional reactive monitoring
5. Does not efficiently solve silo challenges across cloud and on premise systems

As a consequence monitoring with the built in Microsoft tools tends to fall into the same traps as other antiquated tools that sets your organization up for failure.

You can read more about monitoring of Azure with Microsoft's tools here.

Why you should consider using AIMS to Monitor API Management?

AIMS is built on the fundamental value proposition of automating monitoring and insight into increasingly complex enterprise IT systems with a focus on the applications or business processes supported. With Azure, the number of applications – or services – explodes taking the growth in complexity from linear to exponential.

Each of the services or applications requires monitoring of relevant performance metrics. Taking the number of services, systems or applications from tens to thousands with cloud means that you should expand the metrics you monitor by a similar factor – that is probably about 100-fold. That cannot be done by adding manual monitoring or human resources.

Normal behavior

Monitoring of this complexity needs to be done by using machine learning and algorithms. AIMS’ monitoring for Azure fetches all relevant performance metric for each IaaS or PaaS in Azure. For each service we fetch all available metrics in real time and AIMS build normal behavior patterns for each metric. This normal behavior metric represents the cyclicality of your business by different time resolutions – minutes a day, hour per day or day per week. This means that AIMS builds a digital DNA of how your business lives – represented through these normal behavior patterns.  (see image below for example)

Metrics

Now, with this digital DNA that consist of thousands of normal behavior patterns AIMS will monitor in real time the current performance vs the patterns build while also dynamically updating the normal behavior patterns with the new performance data fetched. The effect is that all available metrics are monitoring in real time vs the normal behavior pattern.

For Service Bus AIMS fetch and build normal behavior patterns for the following metrics:

Anomalies

Using normal behavior patterns, AIMS identifies anomalies on each single metric vs normal behavior and correlates the anomalies across the rest of the metrics to create Anomaly Warnings.
Anomaly Warnings provide early notification of trouble with Azure Services or across cloud / hybrid environments.

Auto-detection
You can also use the “Activity & changes” module in the Analytics tab to create reports & dashboards to identify new resources & applications in Azure, which allows early identification of new resources and applications in Azure to ease insight and transparency.
AIMS will do all this without you needing to manually intervene, and there are no static thresholds needed!

AIMS reports & dashboard
All the data collected by AIMS is available to users in the Analytics section that allows you to access default reports or to create custom reports and dashboards. When creating your first report, you will discover that the AIMS Analytics consists of a wide range of possibilities. You can create public or private reports, set a report as a dashboard and define which users will receive dashboard reports.
AIMS stores performance data, making it a valuable data source for later use – such as for root-cause analysis.  More about reports, dashboards and analytics.
 

So, summing up: with AIMS you can automate monitoring of your Azure IaaS and PaaS through a easy configuration that can be done in minutes. This will allow you to free up valuable time spent monitoring using other tools or manual monitoring. The consequence is that you will have better monitoring and more time to deliver projects for your business.

Learn more about how to use AIMS to monitor API Management or sign up for the free Community Edition and test it out for yourself.