Accelerate with APIs: Apigee API monitoring, extensions and hosted targets now generally available

APIs are a key way businesses operate at the speed and scale necessary for today’s economy. We designed Apigee, Google Cloud’s full lifecycle API Management platform, to give businesses control over, and visibility into, the APIs that connect applications and data across the enterprise and across clouds. Apigee was recently recognized by Gartner as a leader in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.

Today we’re announcing the general availability (GA) of several new Apigee capabilities designed to help enterprises unlock the value of their data and deliver modern applications: Apigee API monitoring, Apigee extensions, which includes product level integration with Informatica Integration Cloud, and Apigee hosted targets. Since their beta release in July, we've seen rapid adoption of these features among our customers.

Apigee API monitoring

Apigee API monitoring helps operations teams increase API availability and deliver a seamless connected experience for customers, partners and employees. With Apigee API monitoring, operations teams can now accurately and quickly identify the root cause of API issues based on contextual insights into API performance—whether in a developer application, an API proxy, or a backend service. This helps significantly reduce the mean-time-to-diagnosis (MTTD), giving operations teams more time to prioritize and resolve API-related issues.

“Apigee API monitoring helps us maintain our APIs and thereby deliver consistent customer experience,” says Leilani Hill, Principal Engineer at T-Mobile. “Unlike other synthetic monitoring tools, it equips us with in-depth insights and the ability to quickly look through and diagnose API issues.”

This blog post on Apigee API monitoring provides more details on what this feature available to enterprise accounts has to offer and how it can impact businesses.

Apigee extensions

Apigee’s new extensions feature enables organizations to seamlessly access Google Cloud services like Cloud Firestore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and Spanner. It simplifies interactions with these services and connects to them through a first-class policy interface that an API developer can simply pick from the policy palette and use. Once configured, these can be reused across all API proxies.

“Apigee’s extensions feature enables us to seamlessly connect to cloud services like Google Stackdriver,” says Alberto Mardomingo, Devops Engineer, MásMóvil. “It enables us to focus on the development of our APIs, abstracting away the complexity of connecting and interacting with multiple cloud services. Our API developers can simply pick the policy from a first-class interface, simplifying development and significantly cutting back on release times. We have been able to configure the extension once, and use it everywhere, driving reusability across development teams. This has allowed us to focus on tasks that bring value to our customers, improving user experience and business value.”

We’ve seen many of our customers take advantage of Apigee extensions in a number of different ways.  For example, a major enterprise technology provider is using Apigee extensions to access Cloud Firestore directly from the Apigee Edge interface to personalize content delivery for its web users. Similarly, a large brokerage firm is using extensions to access Cloud Pub/Sub to overcome scaling limitations with their core logging infrastructure. Using extensions, they can capture every user-generated message to help with their compliance needs. You can view the list of Google Cloud services that API developers can easily access and connect to directly from the Apigee Edge interface here.

In addition to the extensions to Google Cloud services now available directly on Apigee, we’re also announcing the availability of a new extension to access Informatica’s integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) offering. This extension, built in partnership with Informatica, allows API developers to use policies to discover and invoke business integration processes that are defined in Informatica’s Integration Cloud. For Integration Architects, this release also automates publishing business and integration process APIs implemented within Informatica Integration Cloud to Apigee Edge as managed APIs.

Learn more about the product level integration between Informatica and Apigee.

Apigee hosted targets

Hosted targets provide enterprises with a simple way to add more business logic to their APIs than previously possible. Leveraging App Engine, hosted targets let enterprises run Node.js applications in a native runtime environment. This means enterprises can deploy applications in a native, secure, scalable, and isolated environment where Edge API proxies can call them as target services.

The handling of Node.js within Apigee Edge is critical to most enterprises. With hosted targets, each API is deployed as its own container on a highly available and scalable container cluster. This helps ensure consistent availability of APIs, and eliminates any limitations faced by the version of Node.js. The inclusion of native Node.js support, within hosted targets, further simplifies the API proxy development process, and helps enterprises focus on creating and deploying managed APIs.

Learn more about Apigee’s hosted target feature.

To get started with these new features right away, visit our Apigee Docs. Or, to learn more about Apigee, and sign up for an Evaluation account, visit the Apigee website.