What is Microsoft Azure API Management?

Microsoft Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. As a platform-as-a-service, API Management supports the complete API lifecycle.

Azure API Management is made up of an API gateway, a management plane, and a developer portal. These components are Azure-hosted and fully managed by default. API Management is available in various tiers differing in capacity and features.

Figure 1 : API Management components

API gateway - All requests from client applications first reach the API gateway, which then forwards them to respective backend services. The API gateway acts as a facade to the backend services, allowing API providers to abstract API implementations and evolve backend architecture without impacting API consumers. The gateway enables consistent configuration of routing, security, throttling, caching, and observability.

Management plane - API providers interact with the service through the management plane, which provides full access to the API Management service capabilities. Customers interact with the management plane through Azure tools including the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, a Visual Studio Code extension, or client SDKs in several popular programming languages.

Developer portal - The open-source developer portal is an automatically generated, fully customizable website with the documentation of your APIs. API providers can customize the look and feel of the developer portal by adding custom content, customizing styles, and adding their branding.

Why Monitor Microsoft Azure API Management?

Microsoft Azure API Management is used to enable the business to function seamlessly and it helps early problem detection, resource optimization, and data-driven decision-making to increase the quality of the API ecosystem. For obtaining focused metrics on overall API service performance, the Microsoft Azure API Management should be continuously monitored, and deficiencies in the performance of APIs should be promptly detected and resolved. For this purpose, eG Enterprise offers a specialized Microsoft Azure API Management monitoring model.