Overview
After you have set up your API Catalog with all your endpoints and assigned team ownership, you can start managing and improving them. Use the API Catalog to start activities such as:
- Detecting and investigating APIs that are under-performing.
- Creating alerts based on key performance metrics such as latency and error rate.
- Keeping track of an API’s reliability in terms of triggered alerts, test results, and security signals.
- Standardizing API testing and improving test coverage with Synthetic Monitoring.
When exploring an endpoint, getting a higher resolution view of the API endpoint details is helpful.
Use the filtering, sorting, and searching options in the API Catalog Explorer to find endpoints of interest.
Click an endpoint to view its details page. Here you can see performance, errors, issues, deployments, monitors, ownership, a dependency map, and metadata information in one central location. From the details page, you can also add custom tags to the endpoint. You can also investigate the various types of telemetry using links to other areas of Datadog.
In the details page, you can:
- Look up a specific endpoint by path (for example,
/checkout) when it shows a high error rate and a high request count. - View the Requests & Errors graph and correlated Response Code graph to identify issues.
- Navigate to related telemetry like traces, logs, and errors.
The graphs on the details page are initially scoped to the same settings as the Explorer page. You can change those settings on the details page to suit your investigation by using the time frame selector and other scope dropdown menus.
You can set up monitors to alert you if something causes your endpoints to perform unexpectedly (like occasionally slow performance), to report outlier data (like extremely slow performance or rare errors), or to achieve metrics beyond a desired threshold (high error rates).
The latest monitor status is displayed in the Explorer where you can see more information about why a monitor is alerting and how to address it. You can also determine if you should launch an investigation by clicking through to view the monitors.
You can also create a monitor on Latency or Error rate directly from API Catalog by clicking + Monitor in the MONITORS column. Read Alerting for additional information about setting up and managing monitor alerts.
Track and improve API test coverage
Using synthetic API tests, you can set up automated scheduled tests of your endpoints that alert you if the tests fail so you can diagnose and fix the problem.
The API TESTS column on the Explorer page shows you which of your endpoints have tests and if any of them are failing. If tests are failing, the test status to investigate further.
Click + API Test in the API TESTS column to create another synthetic API test for this endpoint. Read the documentation about Synthetic HTTP API Tests for more information about setting up tests.
Find and close security gaps
Powered by Datadog Application Security Management (ASM), the SECURITY SIGNALS column in the Explorer shows you if ASM has detected threats to the services associated with your endpoints. Sort the table by this column to see which of your endpoints are most affected. Click View in ASM to investigate and address the threats and vulnerabilities in your code or your upstream dependencies.
Further reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
