Since APIs have been established as the standard form of communication between applications, organizations create and consume many APIs to implement complex business logic, integrations, and transactions. Organizations are using so many APIs that “proliferation of APIs” has become a standard industry term. However, those APIs are no good if you don’t keep a track of them in a standard catalog, don’t know how many different versions of those exist out there, have inconsistencies in how they are proxied, and very importantly don’t have a way to monitor their operations. Having to traverse multiple API gateways, sometimes from different vendors, to access this information becomes a daunting task and often lead to missed cues on possible problems.
Well, no more. We released API Control Plane to directly address this problem and make the lives of API platform providers and product managers easier with a single place where they can keep track of their APIs and their metrics. API Control Plane provides a single catalog of APIs, the runtimes they are proxied on, and data planes that are groups of these runtimes. It shows a map of these assets with all the information you need such as the total number of transactions, average response times, average latency, and error rate. It draws your attention to problematic assets that are performing subpar. It gives you an API Catalog that lists all APIs and their different versions, and highlights discrepancies.
API Control Plane enables API landscape governance and lets you be on top of all your APIs wherever they may be deployed. You can check out its release announcement. It is available self-hosted and as a SaaS, and you can connect your self-hosted and SaaS webMethods API gateways for a hybrid view of all your assets.
Our goal for the initial release of the API Control Plane was to put it out there as soon as possible to provide our customers with tools that will make their jobs easier, and we will continuously enhance it with new features. Some of the exciting things we have planned for next year are 3rd party gateway agents, Developer Portals as runtimes, policy management, and alerting and notifications. Please go ahead and try it out, and make sure to let us know your feedback and how we can make it more useful for you.