APIs are the windows to Enterprise: How to transform BigData by sensing at APIs?
Analytics is a vital part of modern organizations ( e.g. read Role of Analytics in a Digital Business ). While implementing analytics, organizations face three critical challenges, each of which has the potential to delay or derail the project.
- There are no turnkey analytics solutions.
- The organization will need to employ data engineers (developers) and data scientists (architects) who have a deep understanding of statistics, machine learning, and systems. They are in short supply.
- To collect data, organizations need to add instrumentation (sensors) across the organization to generate events that signal important activities. This needs coordination between multiple teams.
API management can provide a solution to this problem. API management is placed strategically at the crossroads of all message flows of an organization. By collecting data at API layer, we can turn on turn-key data collection. Also by using standard message formats to collect data, we can enable turn-key data analysis. API management instrumentation provides an opportunity to build turnkey API-driven analytics solutions that will minimize or even eliminate the need to coordinate multiple teams by making it possible to collect data through one logical layer and provide turnkey analytics scenarios for the organization. As a result, an analytics system that is integrated and built to work closely with API management tools can drastically reduce the cost of applying analytics and make it useful from the day one.
For more details and a blueprint of an API analytics solution, please read my InfoWorld article:
WSO2 API manager has support for API analytics already although it is not yet developed to the level discussed in the article. You can find more information from https://docs.wso2.com/display/AM220/Analytics.
