Importance of API Logging and Analytics for Developers

Developers always need meaningful insights about their code to be effective in their day-to-day programming activities regarding building APIs for either internal or external use. Logging and analytics are always instrumental in providing adequate and necessary insights to developers.

Likewise, API logging and analytics give developers the insight they need to ensure APIs perform their intended functions effectively. To appreciate the importance of API logging and analytics, it is necessary to understand what API logging and analytics are.

What Are API Logging and Analytics?

                                                                                              Source: Sitepoint

API logging is keeping relevant records of input, process, and output of an API, which can be used for various purposes. API logging is carried out whenever we record operations of an API, whether they failed or succeeded. On the other hand, analytics is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. 

Therefore, API analytics can be described as a way of getting useful insight into the operation of an API. API logging and analytics are instrumental in providing the necessary insights developers need to be more efficient in building products, achieving business goals, and delivering a great customer experience.

Importance of API Logging and Analytics for Developers

API logging and analytics are important for many reasons: they provide diagnoses, prescriptions, descriptions, and predictions, all of which make development more effective for developers.

Simplified Diagnosis of API Errors

APIs are meant to be consumed and errors are bound to manifest sometimes. If no data is logged that means there is nothing to analyze to troubleshoot the errors, so dealing with errors would be based on guesses. Some errors may not even be discovered in time, so they would end up affecting user experience. API logging and analytics are advantageous in this case because logs can be analyzed to get insights about errors the APIs run through every time consumers make requests. Developers can then pick up the errors from the logs, analyze them to gain insights, and fix them with precision.

Understanding How APIs Are Being Consumed

Many APIs don’t even log consumer interactions, and that makes it hard to understand how such APIs are being used by consumers. So, it is hard to measure consumer behavior regarding their interactions with the APIs, leaving developers with no insight into the harm and opportunities that might have come with such interactions. 

Understanding how your APIs are being used guides developers toward providing better security, support, and experience to their consumers. For example, some consumers might be making malicious requests to your APIs, and they either fail or succeed at this. API logging and analytics bring such occurrences to the developers’ attention as quickly as possible so they can tackle the occurrence favorably. Without API logging and analytics, it is likely that nothing would be known until serious damage occurred. Anyway, some portals for developers such as the Backstage developer portal makes all the moving parts easy to handle.

                                                                                      Source: API Portal

Gathering of Important Metrics

Measuring an API’s operations gives you the opportunity to gather valuable metrics that can help developers make such APIs better. The frequency of requests, number of users, demography of users, and several other stats can be great insights for developers to set plans to make their APIs better. It might help in determining their choice of infrastructure and more. 

For example, having detailed logs and analytics of a consistent increase in user base and retained users can be an indication for developers to improve infrastructures in order to not go out of service. It can also help them move their server close to the country of their main audience because that will translate to a better experience for the audience.

Provision of Business Insight 

APIs are built to create value for consumers and make profits eventually. API calls can be attributed to individuals interacting with them and that can be used to measure user behavior analytics, which can be effective in calculating revenue, describing user activities, and forecasting business and user needs in the future. 

Now, the question is this: How are business insights important to developers? The answer is that it prompts developers to design adequate systems and architectures that can withstand the business requirements as indicated by the insights derived from API logging and analytics.  

Conclusion

Building APIs to withstand the test of time requires a lot of work for developers and it goes beyond what could be done with guesswork and anecdotal decisions. This is why it is important that developers be well equipped with API logging and analytics to gain the information and insights they need to build APIs that consumers enjoy and love to use.

API logging and analytics are important to developers because it gives them the information and insight to do their job adequately, which enables them to improve on serving their users and advance business goals.