Contents

• Principles of IGT-API: Track API runtime performance

• Interesting Content for the Week

• Product Updates/New Releases

• FeedBack & Share

• Upcoming Conferences

Principles of IGT-API: Track API runtime performance

Continuing the series on the IGT-API framework, this article focuses on the fourth principle - Track API runtime performance. This principle emphasises the importance of monitoring and analysing the performance of your APIs to ensure they meet both technical and business objectives.

Implement API performance monitoring

What it involves: Ensure you have adequate API performance monitoring to track metrics like latency, throughput, and error rates in real-time. Monitoring tools provide a crucial snapshot of your API's health. While average response time is a good start, delve deeper into percentiles (for example, p95, p99) to pinpoint outlier requests that may be causing a poor user experience. Set up automated alerts to notify your team when these metrics exceed predefined thresholds, allowing for a rapid response to issues as they arise.

Why this is important: Automated alerts enable rapid response to issues, minimizing impact. A single slow API call for a small percentage of users can significantly impact their experience, and focusing on metrics like p95 or p99 helps identify these issues.

Tooling: Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualisation platform that lets you create dynamic, customisable dashboards. Prometheus is a powerful open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit for systems and services. New Relic and Datadog are popular commercial monitoring solutions that offer robust API performance monitoring features.

Implement API product analytics

What it involves: Beyond just technical performance, API product analytics connects API usage to business outcomes. This is where you can understand how your APIs are actually being consumed. By analyzing usage patterns, you can see which endpoints are most popular, identify opportunities for new features, and understand the impact of API performance on key business metrics like conversion rates or user retention. This insight helps you make data-driven decisions that align technical strategy with business goals.

Why this is important: This insight enables data-driven decisions, spotting new feature opportunities, and linking performance to key business metrics like conversion or retention.

Tooling: Moesif is a great API observability tool, geared towards API product analytics and API monetisation. Many organisations also use commercial tools like New Relic and Datadog for API product analytics.

Instrument your APIs for observability

To get a complete picture, instrument your APIs for observability. Unlike monitoring, which tells you when something is wrong, observability provides the context needed to understand why. By collecting and analysing logs, metrics, and traces, you can trace a request's entire journey through your system. This full-stack visibility is essential for quickly debugging complex, distributed systems and helps you anticipate issues by revealing hidden dependencies and performance anomalies.

Why this is important: Observability reveals why issues occur, providing full-stack visibility. This is essential for debugging complex systems and anticipating issues by revealing hidden dependencies.

Tooling: Open Telemetry (OTel) is an open-source, vendor-agnostic standard for generating and collecting telemetry data from software. Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic, and Datadog all support OTel for enhanced observability.

Interesting Content for the Week

Runtime AI Governance

llms.txt is overhyped: Adam Altman argues that the proposed llms.txt standard usually compared to robots.txt for AI, is overhyped and ineffective, because, AI models currently neither read nor adhere to this file, therefore it becomes a misdirected effort for content governance.

Protecting MCP Servers from Prompt Injection Attacks: Zuplo outlines an approach to safeguarding Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers against prompt injection attacks. By employing detection techniques such as content analysis and context evaluation, Zuplo’s Prompt Injection Detection Policy offers a robust solution to ensure that MCP servers and AI applications remain secure and operate as intended.

API Production Governance

Exploring api-catalog, a New API Discovery Standard: Kristopher Sandoval discusses API-Catalog, a new standard (RFC 9727) introduced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for API discovery. The primary objective of this standard is to establish a centralised, open, and machine-readable catalogue of APIs, thereby automating and formalising a process that has traditionally been manual and fragmented.

Why Federated API Management Is Essential for Hybrid Cloud: Matthias Biehl highlights how a federated API management model enables IT leaders to strike a balance between maintaining control and ensuring security, while simultaneously fostering agility and innovation within today’s complex, multi-cloud environments.

Dragging Documentation Out of the Dark Ages: Joyce Stack emphasises the value of documentation as a critical component in enhancing efficiency and reducing variance. She asserts that, for documentation to be regarded with the seriousness it deserves, it must be measured and held to the same standards of accountability as project delivery.

Spring Cloud Gateway vs. Traefik Hub: When to Choose a Purpose-Built Gateway: Immánuel Fodor presents a comparison between Spring Cloud Gateway and Traefik Hub, outlining the key features of both solutions. He highlights their respective strengths, with particular emphasis on which is better suited to large-scale, cloud-native environments.

You Might Be Doing API-First Wrong, New Analyst Research Suggests: Heather Halenbeck examines pitfalls in the implementation of an API-first strategy, drawing on recent research from Gartner. She highlights that a key reason many organisations struggle is the mistaken conflation of API management with integration delivery, which undermines the effectiveness of their approach.

Achieving API Traceability with OpenTelemetry and Moesif: Moesif explores how API traceability can be achieved through the integration of OpenTelemetry with the Moesif platform. This approach offers comprehensive visibility into the behaviour and performance of APIs, which is essential for effective debugging and data-driven business decision-making.

Others

Solo.io boss: I was wrong, I made mistakes – and that made me a better CEO: In an interview, Solo.io CEO Idit Levine discusses the mistakes she made as a first-time founder. She shares how these challenges helped her grow as a leader. Levine advises startups to prioritise listening to paying customers.

Product updates / New releases

Introducing gpt-realtime in the API: Join Brad Lightcap, Peter Bakkum, Beichen Li, Liyu Chen, Julianne Roberson, and Srini Gopalan as they introduce and demonstrate open AI’s advanced speech-to-speech model, along with new API features such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), SIP integration, image input, and more.

Powerful new features, accessibility improvements, analytics, and developer enhancements across Redocly product suite: Redocly CLI 2.0 introduces enhanced security and validation features, along with AI integration that enables users to query large language models directly with additional improvements.

Kong Acquires OpenMeter to Bring API and AI Monetization to the Agentic Era:Kong has acquired OpenMeter, an open-source and SaaS company specialising in real-time usage metering and billing. This acquisition aims to strengthen Kong’s unified API platform, Kong Konnect, by introducing advanced monetisation capabilities for APIs, event-driven architectures, and AI workloads.

Create Reusable Prompt Templates with Zuplo MCP Servers: Martyn Davies explores the use of prompt templates as a means to enhance consistency and efficiency in AI interactions. He explains that, rather than crafting prompts manually for each use case, standardised and reusable templates can be developed through Zuplo’s implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Videos

Visual API Workflow Mocking and Testing with Specmatic and Arazzo API Specifications: Specmatic simplifies and automates end-to-end API workflow testing by leveraging Arazzo API specifications as a single source of truth.

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Upcoming API Conferences

APIdays London: Theme: “No AI Without APIs” Conference Date: September 22nd - 24th, Location: Convene 155 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 3YD

Platform Summit 2025: Date: October 13-15, Location: Stockholm, Theme: Engineer Next-Gen API Architectures Register to get your tickets.

Kong API Summit Live 2025: Join developers, leaders, and visionaries from around the world as we explore the latest innovations around APIs, microservices, and AI. Date: Oct 14 - 15, 2025, Location: New York City

API Conference Berlin: Theme: The Conference for Web APIs, API Design & Management, Date: October 20 - 22, 2025. Register to get your tickets.

API World Conference 2025: Date: Sept 3-5 Location - Santa Clara, CA, Sept 10-12 - Live Online, Register to get your tickets

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