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July 8, 2015

Mashape Analytics Targets Micro-Services, APIs

As the enterprise market grows for micro-services architectures and associated APIs, a real-time analytics tool is designed to evaluate the performance of APIs and how they function within micro-services.

San Francisco-based Mashape said it previously used the tool internally to analyze the performance of more than 13,000 APIs carried by its online marketplace. Unveiled in late June, Mashape Analytics is said to be the first open business intelligence and visualization platform to provide real-time visibility into API usage and performance along with micro-services functionality.

Mashape is betting that the growing popularity of micro-services architectures like open-source applications containers will also generate new requirements for real-time analytics. The company maintains that greater visibility into the performance of APIs will be needed as applications are broken down into smaller, more manageable components. In response, developers will need greater visibility into API performance in order to avoid one faltering component of an application from slowing down a company’s entire IT infrastructure.

Hence, Mashape Analytics is being positioned as allowing developers, DevOps teams and CIOs to track micro-services functionality and API performance across critical business applications.

Existing analytics tools used to gauge micro-services are “one-dimensional, not scalable and typically only included as part of a larger suite” Mashape CEO Augusto Marietti noted in a statement. The Mashape micro-services analytics platform is therefore positioned as a dedicated API visualization and business intelligence platform intended to track API usage patterns. At a granular level, it is designed to analyze the volume of requests processed while and detecting bottlenecks along with systems issues in real time, the company said.

In one use case, Mashape said developers could leverage its analytics platform to monitor communication between micro-services hosted inside Docker application containers. “As more organizations move towards a micro-services architecture, developers have a more urgent need for cross-organizational visibility into API behavior, as one faltering component can leave an application prone to latency issues that can cost a company millions,” the company said.

The need for new analysis tools to monitor micro-services architectures is likely to grow as open-source technologies like Docker application containers move from testing and development to production workloads.

Along with real-time visibility into API performance and micro-services functionality, the Mashape platform also includes an “instant replay” feature in which individual API calls can be replayed to help debug issues and optimize performance. The company claimed the replay feature differentiates its platform from competing API analytics tools.

Along with logging what is happening between micro-services, inspecting bottlenecks and issuing alerts on API status, Mashape Analytics also integrates with the company’s Kong API management platform.

Mashape Analytics is available as a software-as-service offering along with an on-premise option. Those options range from a free plan to an enterprise edition.

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