The APIM console has a main and sub-menu on the left. It shows the Dashboard, APIs, Applications, Gateways, Audit, Messages, Analytics, and Settings when opened. This article briefly explains the console and each section. Learn more about API management features.
Navigate to Tools → API manager in integrator.io to access the console.
You can view customized analytics from three tabs.
Use the Dashboard on the left-most menu to get a quick overview of all your APIs, including the API response status and your request and response time. You can also see the API health-check in this section. Each API is monitored by routine interrogation of its health-check endpoint. After receiving a health-check request, the API gateway performs the necessary verifications via probes to return its status.
The Analytics tab on the left-most menu gives you a deep dive into your API usage information, allowing you to filter by Global, Geo, or Users properties. From this page, you can also view Platform logs and see information on Top Applications being used by your API consumers.
Finally, you can view API-specific analytics using the API tab. Choose an API in the API section and scroll to Analytics in the sub-menu. Here, you can see an overview of the health of your specific API, review your API logs, and add path mappings. Use logging with caution and only for development purposes. It requires more space for analytics storage and can impact API performance.
Learn more about configuring your analytics and dashboard.
API consumers will call or subscribe to APIs to retrieve data, invoke functionality, etc. Your APIs are the data source or functionality you want to expose to your consumers. You can view a list of all your APIs or search for a specific API and configure its settings, including policies, plans, subscriptions, and documentation. When managing your APIs, you can choose from various sub-categories.
The Policy Studio is a no-code tool for creating and managing your API. You can configure policies to determine how users will interact with the API, including what features of the API they can access and what governance policy configurations are enforced. The studio is laid out in a simple drag-and-drop format so that you can start quickly. However, you can go into more detail by configuring a flow for a specific API.
The Policy Studio allows you to design "flows" or policy enforcement sequences that protect, transform, or alter how APIs are consumed. It’s a no-code tool for creating and managing your API.
Important
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An APIM flow relates to the different phases of creating, managing, publishing, and subscribing to an API in APIM. This is not the same as a Celigo integrator.io flow.
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You do not have to create a flow to add a policy to the API. However, adding a flow allows you to better control what phases a policy is added to.
The Policy Studio's purpose and functionality are broken into the following sections:
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Design – Manage all flows associated with your Gateway API
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Configuration – Modify settings around flow execution
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Properties – Define key-value pairs at the API level. These properties are read-only during the Gateway's execution of an API transaction.
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Resources – Configure global resources to support your Gateway API's flows
You can create a flow in the Policy Studio and add one or more policies to the Request, Response, Publish, and/or Subscribe phases. When a policy is applied and how it is enforced depends on the phase:
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Request phase – A policy is applied during the connection establishment. The Gateway enforces the policy at the time of the request before a client can access the API they are trying to call.
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Response phase – A policy is applied to the response from the initial connection. The Gateway enforces the policy after the request is allowed, but before the response is returned to the client.
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Publish phase – A policy is applied to messages sent to the endpoint. The Gateway enforces the policy when messages are published before clients can access the API they are trying to call.
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Subscribe phase – A policy is applied to messages received by the entrypoint. The Gateway enforces the policy after messages are subscribed to, but before the response is returned to the client.
You can create multiple policies for a single flow, each with a different configuration and applied to a different API phase. Flows can also be associated with specific plans or as common flows at the API level.
Learn more about the Policy Studio. To learn more about a specific policy, see the Policy reference guide.
Send messages to your API consumers. This can be particularly useful for general alerts or updates about an API. You can send messages to all subscribers or just a subset based on account ownership.
Use this section to configure plans, documentation, or internal user access. You can categorize APIs in the Info section, start or stop an API, deploy the API, or even add labels. This is also where you can manage your Plans and subscriptions. You’ll need to use these features regularly to restrict access to your APIs. Finally, use the Documentation option to create and publish OpenAPI specs. While integrator.io will automatically generate a spec in most cases, you’ll still need to validate and publish it before it’s viewable.
The Proxy section handles anything related to your API entrypoints, determining how users access your API. For example, in a SpaceX API, your context path would be /spacex. If you push your API through integrator.io, this will be set automatically. The most important configuration in this section is CORS. You’ll need to enable CORS to get access to the Try it feature, which allows consumers to test your API before subscribing to it. Learn more about Configuring proxy settings.
Use this section to view all the endpoints associated with your API.
Load-balancing is a technique used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple backend servers. The goal of load-balancing is to optimize resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overloading any single server. The Gateway comes with a built-in load balancer, which you can enable and configure for your API endpoints according to your requirements.
Failover is a mechanism to ensure high availability and reliability of APIs by redirecting incoming traffic to a secondary server or backup system in the event of a primary server failure. Celigo's API management includes built-in failover mechanisms and capabilities.
Arguably, the most important feature is the Health check feature. You must enable Health check to monitor the availability and health of your endpoints and/or API Gateways. It’s recommended that you enable Health check for every API.
Learn more about Health check.
This section allows you to check logs at the API level. These are audit logs for your API management service, not for logging your API events. Instead, these audit logs focus on management events, like expired API keys, updated API configurations, and subscription and plan updates.
See this article's Dashboard and Analytics section to learn about logging API events.
This tab displays all available applications, including any Demo applications you’ve created or applications created by your API consumers. You’ll generally see application details, including the APIs they’re subscribed to, any members added to the application, and application analytics and logs. This is also where you can approve a subscription to an API.
Note
While you can create an application and subscribe to an API here, you should become familiar with the Developer portal, where your API consumers can create their own applications.
Use the Audit tab to review logs, either generally or for a specific event or type of audit. These logs are not specific to a particular API.
This tab is similar to the API-specific message section; however, it can send messages to every user or member in the API management system. You can narrow it down to a specific subset of users but can’t send an individual message to one person.
You can configure various settings in this tab. The Analytics tab was previously covered in the Dashboard and Analytics section.
There are various settings that allow you to configure your Developer portal and the APIM Console.
Allows you to add extra information about your APIs in the Developer portal. You can also configure the information shown for each API and a promotion banner.
The Celigo Quality feature enables API governance by allowing you to create and automatically assign customizable scores based on certain variables determined to impact API quality. If API Quality is enabled, APIs that you create in Celigo will automatically be assigned an API quality score.
Switch on to enable Category mode and automatically replace API gallery by Category gallery. Switch off to disable this option.
Client registration providers allow you to plug any authorization server compliant with the OpenID Connect Dynamic Client Registration. By defining this DCR (Dynamic Client Registration) provider, you can automatically associate an OAuth client with an application and apply security best practices according to the application type you choose.
Site-wide documentation creates a direct line of communication with your developer community. Administrators can use site-wide documentation to communicate best practices, configure pages, or as a reference via custom navigation. Published documentation is accessible from the Developer Portal's Documentation page.
You can configure many settings for both the Developer portal and the APIM console.
In the Console section, you can configure different security plan types, API labels, Dashboard, and Primary owner settings.
Some portal settings you can configure include tile modes, support settings for users in the Developer portal, ratings, and enabling user registration. Additionally, you can determine how users can view your OpenAPI documentation (Swagger-UI or Redoc). you can manage CORS site wide CORS settings. You will still need to enable CORS by API.
Celigo's API management feature only allows you to configure dictionaries.
While API Publishers can create properties for their own APIs, dictionaries provide a way to manage properties independent of individual APIs, making it possible to apply them across APIs and maintain them globally by a different user profile, such as an administrator.
Dictionary properties are based on key-value pairs. You can create two types of dictionaries:
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Manual dictionaries, with static properties defined manually at dictionary creation time
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Dynamic dictionaries, with properties updated continually, based on a schedule and source URL defined at dictionary creation time
You can use dictionaries anywhere in APIM where Expression Language is supported, such as when defining policies for API flows. You can access dictionary properties with the Expression Language statement #dictionaries.
Dictionaries need to be deployed to the API Gateway before you can use them. You can see the date and time the dictionary was last deployed in the dictionary list
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