Overview

API Catalog provides a single view and entry point for exploring the performance, reliability, and ownership of all your API endpoints in one place. It’s a central place where your whole company can find up-to-date information about the characteristics of the APIs used by internal services (private APIs) and external users (publicly exposed APIs).

Monitor your mission-critical, API-driven business features, standardize and validate API performance expectations, and alert when performance deviates from them.

Use cases

API Catalog combines data from across Datadog to provide opinionated workflows so you can explore and monitor your APIs from different sources in one unified view. API Catalog provides:

• Automated discoverability with one inventory for all public, private, and partner APIs, where endpoints are the organizing principle.
• Correlation of and direct linking to API metadata from different Datadog sources.
• API endpoint metrics, such as Last Seen, Requests, Latency, and Errors, to identify performance issues and track API health.
• Alerting on endpoints that deviate from defined performance expectations and thresholds.
• API ownership information (team, on-call, communication channels) directly associated with each endpoint, to know who to reach when something goes wrong.
• Coverage and status of API monitors, synthetic tests, and security signals, with direct access to more information for your incident, troubleshooting, and vulnerability investigations.

Getting started

If you’re already monitoring the performance of your services using Datadog APM, API Catalog automatically detects endpoints in your instrumented services.

Exploring APIs

Use the API Catalog Explorer page to navigate through all the endpoints.

See Exploring APIs for more information.

Assigning owners

Add ownership information to endpoints so your catalog is even more useful for investigations and team communication.

Read Assigning Owners for more information.

Monitoring your APIs

Use your full catalog to start managing your APIs and endpoints:

• Find and fix underperforming endpoints.
• Track their reliability against standards and objectives.
• Watch for anomalies.
• Investigate errors.
• Ensure test coverage.
• Close security gaps.

Read Monitoring APIs for more information.

Adding entries to API Catalog

Register automatically detected endpoints to groups of APIs to track their usage, set ownership, and set monitoring policies from a centralized location. Alternatively, upload an OpenAPI/Swagger file to benefit from the full value of API Catalog.

Read Adding Entries to API Catalog for more information.

Adding metadata to APIs

Add metadata to APIs through the Datadog UI or API, or use automated pipelines through the GitHub integration or Terraform.

Read Adding Metadata to APIs for more information.

Key terminology

API

A set of protocols and tools that allow two applications to communicate.

API endpoint

The address of a resource (URL) of a server or a service that implements the set of rules defined in the API, often through an HTTP, RESTful API interface. The API endpoint is responsible for making the API call response.

API Catalog displays API endpoints as the HTTP method (for example, GET), the URL path (for example, /payment/{shop_id}/purchase), and the name of the service this resource serves (for example, Payments).

API Catalog in beta supports only HTTP endpoints.

Public APIs

Customer-facing API endpoints that are accessible from the internet.

Private APIs

Also called internal APIs. These are only for internal use in an organization and are used mainly for backend service communication. These are the most common type of API.

Partner APIs

Also called third-party APIs. These are another organization’s public endpoints that your organization uses to provide your services (for example, Stripe, Google, and Facebook).

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Manage API performance, security, and ownership with Datadog API CatalogBLOG Datadog Service CatalogDOCUMENTATION Synthetic API TestsDOCUMENTATION ASM API SecurityDOCUMENTATION Mitigate the primary risks to API securityBLOG