TRACING AND MONITORING
Track API usage with Prometheus and Grafana in ASP.Net core
A brief guide on how Prometheus and Grafana can be used for monitoring the API usage in ASP.NET core web application
There can be many scenario where you want to trace API usage for different purposes.
- you want to charge your customer based on no of API calls.
- you want to know popularity of certain APIs.
- and many others.
In this tutorial, we are going to look at how we can use Prometheus to track the API usage.
So let’s get started.
Setting up Prometheus and Grafana
I will be making use of Prometheus and Grafana docker version. Below you can find docker-compose file to setup Prometheus and Grafana.
Note: Be sure to create grafana-data and prom directory in current directory
create a file inside ‘prom’ directory “prometheus.yml” and add the configuration.
Open cmd and run the command to create the containers.
docker-compose up -d
So now both containers are running , we can verify by visiting the respective urls.
For Prometheus : http://localhost:30090
For Grafana : http://localhost:30091
Our basic setup for Prometheus and grafana is ready. we comeback to them once we write our API.
Sample API
Now we implement simple API of which we want to track the usage.
dotnet new webapi -o MyDemoAPIopen it visual studio or VS code.
change the applicationUrl in launchSettings.json
“applicationUrl”: “http://localhost:5000",build the API and ran it once to confirm if it is running on port 5000.
Add the required nuget reference.
Install-Package prometheus-net.AspNetCoreand add the required code in Program.cs
we are ready to run.
let’s build the API and ran it.
Let’s also verify if Prometheus is able to detect it.
go to http://localhost:30090/targets
as we can see it is up.
Now call the API from swagger or any other tool.
View Prometheus metrics
we can Prometheus metric at http://localhost:5000/metrics
and in the marked area we can see the http_requests_received_total which indicates the no of request received and we can also see which API wise counter.
we can also verify same via Prometheus UI.
go to http://localhost:30090/graph and select graph tab.
Enter http_requests_received_total as query in search box and hit
we can see in the graph the no of API calls.
Till now we have seen this graphs in Prometheus.
Setup Grafana dashboard
Now move to Grafana http://localhost:30091
First add the data source as Prometheus with correct URL.
and then Add new dashboard and add new panel and add the query
Save the dashboard, Give it name you want and save it.
and finally you can visualize the API usage in the Grafana dashboard.
Source code available here
Summary
Tracking API Usage helps businesses track and reconcile product usage metrics to make it easier to measure product performance, integrate usage information in lead scoring, and perform billing against contracts.
In this tutorial, we have looked at how we can use Prometheus to collect the API metrics and use Grafana for nice visualization.
Hope you enjoy reading..!
Additional resources.
