Mashape Launches API Analytics Platform

Mashape today announced the launch of its analytics service for APIs.

Over the years, the company built out its own analytics service to monitor the over 13,000 APIs the company serves. Now, it’s spinning this service out to allow developers and devops teams to understand their own APIs’ performance better — even if the API isn’t hosted by Mashape.

As Mashape CEO Augusto Marietti told me, the company decided to embark on this project a few months ago. The team decided that this was the right kind of product to spin out into its own stand-alone service. He noted that the new analytics already powers part of Mashape’s marketplace, “but when you already have an API, you don’t need the marketplace. By spinning it out as a stand-alone entity, anybody can use it for their internal APIs and microservices architecture.”

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Using Mashape Analytics, developers will be able to figure out which APIs and endpoints are used most often (both by internal and external clients) and how well they perform. It’s essentially Google Analytics for APIs, as Marietti calls it. API performance data will stream into the service in real time, but if things go wrong, users will also be able to call up an instant replay of individual API calls to debug issues.

Mashape rightly argues that as businesses start adopting a microservices architecture for their applications, the number of APIs developers have to work with and monitor inevitable increases. Existing tools like New Relic and Splunk tend to focus more on the server and less on the API, so a highly focused tool like Mashape Analytics fills an important niche for developers.

To get started with Mashape Analytics, developers simply have to download an agent, which will then start to monitor the traffic.

Pricing for the new service is based on how long you want to retain your data, which is similar to how New Relic charges for its service, too, for example. There is a free plan with 24-hour data retention, a $149/month plan for two weeks of data retention and if you need more than that, you can opt for the $495/month plan with a 90-day retention time.

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