Book Image

API Analytics for Product Managers

By : Deepa Goyal
Book Image

API Analytics for Product Managers

By: Deepa Goyal

Overview of this book

APIs are crucial in the modern market as they allow faster innovation. But have you ever considered your APIs as products for revenue generation? API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development. Of course, it's not all about the product—as any good product manager knows; you need to understand your customers’ needs, expectations, and satisfaction too. Once you've gathered your data, you’ll need to be able to derive actionable insights from it. This is where the book covers the advanced concepts of leading and lagging metrics, removing bias from the metric-setting process, and bringing metrics together to establish long- and short-term goals. By the end of this book, you'll be perfectly placed to apply product management methodologies to the building and scaling of revenue-generating APIs.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
21
The API Analytics Cheat Sheet

Infrastructure Metrics

API producers build APIs for a number of customers, both internal and external. From a technical point of view, any API must meet certain engineering standards for your software architects to accept it. As we discussed in Chapter 3, engineering standards control how the APIs are built, tested, secured, and put into use. Once your APIs are in production, however, it is important to start monitoring their performance and usage.

In this chapter, you will learn how reliability is defined and how the reliability of APIs delivers value to customers. The topics we will be covering in this chapter include the following:

  • Key success factors (KSFs) for APIs
  • Infrastructure as the foundation for API analytics
  • Performance metrics
  • Usage metrics
  • Reliability metrics

The first step in giving your users a high-quality experience is to have well-defined metrics for how your API works and how it is used.