REST API Management, Monitoring & Analytics using Kong 3

Disclaimer for Udemy Business Users

This course requires you to download the following software: Docker Desktop.

If you are a Udemy Business user, please check with your employer before downloading the software.

NOTE:

• This is NOT a coding course. The focus is on API management tools using off-the-shelf (ready-to-use) software

• You don't need any credit card or payment to use tools in this course. All software (including the API manager itself) is available as a free edition. Some might even open-source their codes.

Update January 2024

Major Update

• Use Kong 3, Elastic 8, and the latest software version (as of 2024)

• Improved audio for ALL lectures

Update November 2020

Major Update

• Use Kong 2, Elastic 7, and the latest software version (as of 2020)

• Added: OAuth2

• Added: Proxy Cache

• Improved audio for ALL lectures

  
  

Before We Begin

If you want to learn, you simply need a web browser. For running tools and hands-on, specific hardware and software are required. Please see the requirements in Lecture One (with the title Readme First: Hardware & Software Required).

Prerequisites

We will use Docker (container technology) to install the tools required for this API management course. In this course, you will learn basic knowledge of Docker. To install docker, you need to be familiar with:

• Windows: basic command prompt usage & command, administrator access

• Mac / Linux: basic terminal usage & command, root / sudo access

I provide Docker installation instructions for Windows 10 Professional Edition. For any other operating system -including other version of Windows-, I provide reference to official documentation, but not the video. I'm sorry about this, since I don't have a Mac / Linux machine.

Don't worry; the official documentation is complete and easy to follow.

Works with REST API

Your workplace adopts modern architecture and relies on REST API. Having REST API gives benefits, but the benefits come at a cost. For most teams, the processes of setting and enforcing standards or policies across their APIs are entirely manual. Often that process involves multiple teams or team members and becomes even more painful as the number of APIs grows. 

Now that you have provisioned your APIs, you also need to have visibility on your APIs.  How is your API traffic trending over time? Which API is used most? Which API has a large error rate? Having this data will help you analyze and make the correct decision for further API development.

Policies, securities, or analytics can be implemented by writing additional logic on your APIs. You can even write your own analytics tools for monitoring & analyzing your APIs. But those processes will be redundant and time-consuming. Why don't we find a more efficient way for developers to focus on business needs?  That will ultimately maximize the productivity of the developers who build on the API and, in turn, benefit the company.   

API Management Software

API management tools can be an answer. API manager tools in the market likely provide common API capabilities, like:

• API gateway, a single communication point for accessing API

• Basic security for accessing API

• Traffic control, like rate limiting or quota

• Monitor API health (is API accessible or down?)

• Load balancing

• API Analytics (hit rate, error rate)

• Logging your traffic

• The developer portal acts as API documentation. A common API documentation format is swagger / Open API specification

  
  

Big players like Google, IBM, or Axway provide good features for API management -if you are willing to pay some amount of money-. But if you prefer an open-source, start-small approach (but still good), there are also several API manager tools in the market, one of which is Kong API Manager (which we use in this course).

In this course, we will learn API Management using several tools. All software is available as a free edition. Some come with the option to upgrade to a premium edition with more features. The tools we will learn here are:

• Kong API management

  This is the main focus of this course.

• Docker and docker-compose

  Popular container technology to speed up our installation and configuration. However, this course is NOT a docker course, so we will not go deep into docker.

• Zipkin

  An open-source REST API tracing tool. Useful for distributed tracing on different services, even if the API services are scattered on several machines.

• Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana

  A Popular search engine and its visualization tools. This course is an introductory course on how to use these stacks to analyze your API traffic. However, this course does not focus on the elastic stack.

• Prometheus & Grafana

  Open-source monitoring tools to gather performance metrics and display those metrics as time-series charts.

Benefits of API Management (for Engineering and Business)

Let's face it: we have time constraints. Business needs those APIs. And they need it fast.

Writing API that just functionally works but is not secure or is technically flawed will bring trouble sooner or later. Maybe somebody will find a security hole in your API and exploit it. Or do you work in a place where API is used in many places by many people / systems? Without transparency in API analytics (usage, error rate, etc.), it is difficult to know whether your API works fine or needs improvement.

Writing codes for implementing API security, analytics, or some other technical aspects is nice. Either veteran programmers or new kids in the house will love the challenge of writing such codes and solving complex problems.

But the time constraints speak loudly. Writing such codes can be time-consuming. It is a good thing to focus developers' efforts on delivering business logic, which, in turn, keeps the business ahead.

API management can be used to help you solve common API aspects, like security, analytics, or who can access which API. And most of the time, you don't need to write any code. Put your API behind some API management, and configure it to work with your API.

That means productivity increases. Whatever role you have in the company, productivity is always a good thing, and API management (even open-source) can help you boost it.

Kong API Management

Kong provides an API gateway for REST APIs with a plug-in architecture to enable users to add functionalities to the core Kong gateway. Kong's API management platform is attractively lean. It should appeal to users with basic

requirements who want to get an initial platform that they can then add as they go, either

with Kong-or-community-provided plug-ins or with developments of their own (yes, it's possible to develop a Kong plugin based on your own requirements, although we don't cover it in this course). Companies that aim to use the Kong API management platform can start fast, as you can see in the course -less than 1 hour to set up and run-.

Users looking to execute digital strategies will find Kong useful for enabling their platforms.

API Monitoring & Analytics

In this course, we will learn to do analytics and monitoring not only using Kong API Manager but also some other tools and, most importantly, how to integrate them. One tool only is quite powerful, but integration will give us more benefits

API management tools usually come with an API analytics module. We can use the analytics to gain visibility of the entire API ecosystem. The analytics will automatically and continuously collect all API-traffic data, like performance time, hit rate (how many hits in seconds), and error rate. By leveraging API analytics, we can learn which APIs have good value and which ones need to be improved.

On the operation side, we can proactively use API monitoring tools to detect API traffic and performance issues. Imagine if a service is down at 10 AM, and nobody knows until one hour later, which means problems have already arisen and some business opportunity might already lost. By leveraging open-source Kong API management (and several other free tools), we can get a notification in less than 5 minutes after the service is troubled.