Advanced API Ops: Bringing the power of AI and ML to API operations

Most business-critical applications today are powered by APIs, so any downtime or performance degradation can lead to significant loss in revenue, customers, and brand value. This puts pressure on operations teams to monitor real-time API performance and security. Adding to the challenge is the need to support new releases and reduce resolution times. And unfortunately, traditional third-party monitoring tools are little to no help when it comes to API operations. 

To help, we’re bringing the power of industry-leading AI and ML technologies to API operations with Advanced API Ops^Beta, a part of Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform. Advanced API Ops leverages your historical data to equip you with automated and actionable tools to easily help ensure APIs are always available, secure, and performing as expected. Its AI-powered automation capabilities significantly improve your productivity and reduce the mean-time-to-diagnosis (MTTD) of your APIs.

Now available in beta, Advanced API Ops includes anomaly detection and advanced API security reporting features. Very soon, you’ll also be able to use additional features like API testing and SLO reporting as part of this solution. 

Citrix, a leader in desktop and application virtualization services, uses Advanced API Ops to proactively monitor the performance, availability, and security health of its APIs. 

“By applying AI and ML models to our historical API data, these advanced features are able to alert us about scenarios we haven’t thought of. Such automation capabilities significantly reduce our upfront efforts. And from a security perspective, the actionable insights help us ensure that our proxies are exposed only over secure HTTPs ports and adhere to compliance requirements. We’re also able to closely monitor user activity and quickly pull out reports during audits.” - Adam Brancato, Sr. Manager, Global Technology and Security at Citrix

Here’s a closer look at the functionality available with Advanced API Ops:

Anomaly detection
Ops teams traditionally set thresholds on API attributes (such as traffic or latency) based on historic operational data. But when you set static thresholds on your operational metrics, you often end up receiving too many false alerts, which can distract you from more important problems. Advanced API Ops applies AI and ML models to your historical time-series data to predict the behavior of your APIs and, in real time, automatically detect anomalies that could adversely impact your business. It dynamically sets thresholds on your alerts and gives you the flexibility to configure variance limits.

Actionable insights into API security
As you open up your core business assets to internal and external stakeholders with APIs, you open them to potential abuse. Therefore, it’s important for operations teams to gain visibility into security attributes of your APIs (e.g., policy configurations, whether they use HTTP or HTTPs) to continuously monitor and maintain the health of your API programs. Advanced API Ops helps reduce the business impact of security incidents by providing actionable insights to quickly identify them and precisely diagnose their root cause. It also provides a holistic view of policy and shared flow configurations across proxies to help ensure that APIs adhere to security and compliance requirements. You can also monitor user access to sensitive data such as developer information, trace sessions, and API keys to prevent abuse.

Getting started
If you're already an Apigee Enterprise or Enterprise Plus customer, check out the documentation to get started with Advanced API Ops. You'll find a complete feature overview, guided tutorials, FAQs, and more. And if you're not already an Apigee Edge customer, you can try it for free!

Advanced API Ops beta will be made available to all Apigee Enterprise and Enterprise Plus cloud customers over the next few weeks. When generally available, Advanced API Ops will be a paid add-on to Apigee’s Enterprise subscription and will be included as part of its Enterprise Plus subscription. To learn more about the best practices of analyzing APIs, download our latest eBook, “Mastering Full-Lifecycle API Management with Analytics.”