Tutorial: Monitor published APIs

With Azure Monitor, you can visualize, query, route, archive, and take actions on the metrics or logs coming from your Azure API Management service.

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

You can also use API Management's built-in analytics to monitor the usage and performance of your APIs.

Prerequisites

• Learn the Azure API Management terminology.
• Complete the following quickstart: Create an Azure API Management instance.
• Also, complete the following tutorial: Import and publish your first API.

Availability

View metrics of your APIs

API Management emits metrics every minute, giving you near real-time visibility into the state and health of your APIs. The following are the two most frequently used metrics. For a list of all available metrics, see supported metrics.

• Capacity - helps you make decisions about upgrading/downgrading your APIM services. The metric is emitted per minute and reflects the gateway capacity at the time of reporting. The metric ranges from 0-100 calculated based on gateway resources such as CPU and memory utilization.
• Requests - helps you analyze API traffic going through your API Management services. The metric is emitted per minute and reports the number of gateway requests with dimensions including response codes, location, hostname, and errors.

To access metrics:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance. On the Overview page, review key metrics for your APIs.

2. To investigate metrics in detail, select Metrics from the menu near the bottom of the page.

   

3. From the drop-down, select metrics you are interested in. For example, Requests.

4. The chart shows the total number of API calls.

5. The chart can be filtered using the dimensions of the Requests metric. For example, select Add filter, select Backend Response Code Category, enter 500 as the value. Now the chart shows the number of requests that were failed in the API backend.

Set up an alert rule

You can receive alerts based on metrics and activity logs. Azure Monitor allows you to configure an alert to do the following when it triggers:

• Send an email notification
• Call a webhook
• Invoke an Azure Logic App

To configure an example alert rule based on a request metric:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance.

2. Select Alerts from the menu bar near the bottom of the page.

   

3. Select + New alert rule.

4. In the Create alert rule window, Select condition.

5. In the Configure signal logic window:

   1. In Signal type, select Metrics.
   2. In Signal name, select Requests.
   3. In Split by dimensions, in Dimension name, select Gateway Response Code Category.
   4. In Dimension values, select 4xx, for client errors such as unauthorized or invalid requests.
   5. In Alert logic, specify a threshold after which the alert should be triggered and select Done.

   

6. Select an existing action group or create a new one. In the following example, a new action group is created. A notification email will be sent to admin@contoso.com.

   

7. Enter a name and description of the alert rule and select the severity level.

8. Select Create alert rule.

9. Now, test the alert rule by calling the Conference API without an API key. For example:

   curl GET https://apim-hello-world.azure-api.net/conference/speakers HTTP/1.1 
   

   An alert will be triggered based on the evaluation period, and email will be sent to admin@contoso.com.

   Alerts also appear on the Alerts page for the API Management instance.

   

Activity logs

Activity logs provide insight into the operations that were performed on your API Management services. Using activity logs, you can determine the "what, who, and when" for any write operations (PUT, POST, DELETE) taken on your API Management services.

You can access activity logs in your API Management service, or access logs of all your Azure resources in Azure Monitor.

To view the activity log:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance.

2. Select Activity log.

   

3. Select the desired filtering scope and then Apply.

Resource logs

Resource logs provide rich information about operations and errors that are important for auditing as well as troubleshooting purposes. Resource logs differ from activity logs. The activity log provides insights into the operations that were performed on your Azure resources. Resource logs provide insight into operations that your resource performed.

To configure resource logs:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance.

2. Select Diagnostic settings.

   

3. Select + Add diagnostic setting.

4. Select the logs or metrics that you want to collect.

   You can archive resource logs along with metrics to a storage account, stream them to an Event Hub, or send them to a Log Analytics workspace.

For more information, see Create diagnostic settings to send platform logs and metrics to different destinations.

View diagnostic data in Azure Monitor

If you enable collection of GatewayLogs or metrics in a Log Analytics workspace, it can take a few minutes for data to appear in Azure Monitor. To view the data:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance.

2. Select Logs from the menu near the bottom of the page.

   

Run queries to view the data. Several sample queries are provided, or run your own. For example, the following query retrieves the most recent 24 hours of data from the GatewayLogs table:

ApiManagementGatewayLogs
| where TimeGenerated > ago(1d) 

For more information about using resource logs for API Management, see:

• Get started with Azure Monitor Log Analytics, or try the Log Analytics Demo environment.

• Overview of log queries in Azure Monitor.

The following JSON indicates a sample entry in GatewayLogs for a successful API request. For details, see the schema reference.

{
    "Level": 4,
    "isRequestSuccess": true,
    "time": "2020-10-14T17:xx:xx.xx",
    "operationName": "Microsoft.ApiManagement/GatewayLogs",
    "category": "GatewayLogs",
    "durationMs": 152,
    "callerIpAddress": "xx.xx.xxx.xx",
    "correlationId": "3f06647e-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-530eb9f15261",
    "location": "East US",
    "properties": {
        "method": "GET",
        "url": "https://apim-hello-world.azure-api.net/conference/speakers",
        "backendResponseCode": 200,
        "responseCode": 200,
        "responseSize": 41583,
        "cache": "none",
        "backendTime": 87,
        "requestSize": 526,
        "apiId": "demo-conference-api",
        "operationId": "GetSpeakers",
        "apimSubscriptionId": "master",
        "clientTime": 65,
        "clientProtocol": "HTTP/1.1",
        "backendProtocol": "HTTP/1.1",
        "apiRevision": "1",
        "clientTlsVersion": "1.2",
        "backendMethod": "GET",
        "backendUrl": "https://conferenceapi.azurewebsites.net/speakers"
    },
    "resourceId": "/SUBSCRIPTIONS/<subscription ID>/RESOURCEGROUPS/<resource group>/PROVIDERS/MICROSOFT.APIMANAGEMENT/SERVICE/APIM-HELLO-WORLD"
}

Next steps

In this tutorial, you learned how to:

Advance to the next tutorial: