Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

December 2021

Top 8 Moesif Competitors and Alternatives in 2022

Moesif offers self-service analytics for everyday use, as well as features that aid with cost-effective analytics expansion. Customers use it to monitor features to better understand when there are API difficulties, and there are extra features to determine who is using the API, how often they use it, and who is likely to discontinue using it based on how they use it.

How to Choose the Best API Management Platform

An API or Application Programming Interface is how two applications communicate with one another; it is also the way users access an application. All websites and applications use some form of API through an API gateway, which serves as an entry point to a service. Unfortunately, over 90% of businesses have suffered from a security problem related to their APIs, making API security a top concern. For this reason and more, many businesses require a dedicated API management platform.

Insomnia Projects: API Collaboration and Documentation

We don’t build our own ticket tracking systems or email clients, so why do we expect every person who joins a team to build their own collection of snippets for interacting with internal systems? These systems are usually not well documented, and the only way to learn how to use them is by asking someone or reading source code. Let’s learn how to use Insomnia Projects with our new collaboration features to provide a prebuilt collection of sample requests, plus documentation about the purpose of each endpoint so that your new team members can be productive on day one.

REST API Observability for Python

In this blog post we’ll help answer the age old question, “What does this service talk to and what does it say?” We’ll see how to inspect inbound and outbound REST API calls to see what calls are being made and what incoming traffic causes a reaction. This can be pretty handy when you’re taking over maintenance of an existing service, or if your code just isn’t behaving the way you expect.

G2 Winter 2022 Fastest Implementation: DreamFactory Awarded!

DreamFactory is proud to announce its achievement in the G2 Winter Quarter 2022 Fastest Implementation report. Our accomplishment in the Winter 2022 quarter shows not only the hard work our team has put in over the last quarter, but also reflects how satisfied our customers are with our product.

Embracing Failure With Gremlin Chaos Engineering

In this episode of Kongcast, I spoke with Jason Yee, director of advocacy at Gremlin, about the concept of chaos engineering, why even the best engineers can’t control everything, and tools and tactics to help build app resiliency. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

G2 Winter 2022: DreamFactory awarded Best Estimated ROI

DreamFactory is proud to announce G2 has recognized us as the Best Estimated ROI in the API Management category for the G2 Winter 2022 quarter! Our accomplishment in the Winter 2022 quarter shows not only the hard work our team has put in over the last quarter, but also reflects how satisfied our customers are with our product.

Webhooks Explained - What are they & Which tools are best to create them?

As project needs evolve and expand, people need tools or software to enhance business operations and improve productivity. Over the past few years, several frameworks have been designed to aid the development of such tools and software, and among them webhooks are prominent ones. Webhooks are essentially tools used to automate business processes and allow organizations to provide interactive capabilities to customers.

The 7 Major Players in Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service You Should Look Out For in 2022

Enterprise Integration Platform as a service (EiPaaS) is commonly used to describe a suite of cloud-based tools and services that are designed to support enterprise-grade integration strategy and initiatives. The hallmarks of EiPaaS products are ease-of-use, standardization and pre-built modules such as connection endpoints (usually API-based, to connect to a business application like CRM or ERP), automation flow builder and error handler.

Achieving Maximum API Platform Security With Kong

Before exposing your company’s APIs, your highest priority should be to assure the security, governance and reliability of those APIs. To do so, you’ll need to use an API gateway as a single secure entry point for API consumers rather than allowing direct access to APIs. Kong Gateway can help manage the full lifecycle of services and APIs as well as secure and govern the access to those APIs within an API platform.

API Infrastructure: ESB Versus API Gateway (Part 1)

For the modern enterprise, the focus on customer obsession—an endeavor shown by research to bring better revenue growth and customer retention—requires connectivity across all of an organization’s resources. Back in the day, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was the primary provider of connectivity for a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Set API Bandwidth Limits With This Hackathon Award-Winning Plugin

This year, we hosted our inaugural Kong Summit Hackathon. This virtual competition engaged our open source community and offered recognition and prizes for hacks in various categories. The community delivered with ingenious plugins, hacks and documentation. This blog post highlights our Kong Gateway plugin winner, Narendra Patel. Narendra is a senior DevOps engineer at Egnyte with close to 10 years of experience as a developer, DevOps engineer, SRE and in RPA (robotics process automation).

10 Best Practices for Building a Good API

APIs are being created faster than ever before with ever-advancing technologies such as node.js and AngularJS. With the flexibility in design and integrations for APIs, there isn't a more exciting time than now to be an API developer. However, with so many new technologies and methods of creating APIs comes the question, "What makes a good API?" While the increase in API creation has many advantages for businesses in multiple areas, there is also more room for low-quality API production.

The Next Generation of Cloud Connectivity: Apache Kafka, API Gateway and Service Mesh

Let’s boldly go where no one has gone before. Get ready, Star Trek fans! Jean-Luc Picard will be representing our microservice. Once we have Jean-Luc in our ship (microservice in production), what happens on day 2? We still need to add authorization, load balancing, rate limiting, etc. With an API gateway, like Kong Gateway, you don’t have to know how to do this because a set of program components, called plugins, allow you to implement this without any problem.

Apache Kafka, API Gateway and Service Mesh for Cloud Connectivity

In this video, @Viktor Gamov illustrates the differences between an API gateway and service mesh — and when to use one or the other pragmatically and objectively. He also discuss the similarities and differences between the communication layer provided by gateways, service mesh and Apache Kafka. Finally, you will learn a few ways to use Apache Kafka within a service mesh architecture.

Kong Gateway 2.7 Is Here and Ready!

Today, we are welcoming another noteworthy advancement of the Kong Gateway – the general availability of version 2.7! Both Kong Gateway and Kong Gateway OSS version 2.7 downloads are available on your favorite distribution channels. This release of the Kong Gateway includes a number of important features that serve as a foundation for addressing three key areas.

Creating a User Retention Analysis in Moesif

Making sure that users derive value from your product can usually be determined by your user retention. User retention measures what percentage of your users are returning to and using your product. Retention is a key metric to measure business health and product success. In this tutorial, Matt shows users how to set up a retention analysis in the User Retention screen in Moesif. He covers how to: Navigate to the User Retention screen Create a “First Event” and a “Returning Event” to measure the retention How to interpret the results

Creating a Behavioral Email in Moesif

Using metrics to drive an email flow can provide next-level service to your users. Once a user fits a certain criteria, Moesif can automatically send one-time and recurring emails based on that behavior. In this tutorial, Matt goes over the basic steps to set up a behavioral email in Moesif. These steps include: After this overview, users will be able to set up their own behavioral emails with ease in Moesif.

Kong Gateway User Meetup | December 2021 | Hackathon winner showcase - Rate limiting plugin

In this session, we welcome our Kong Summit Hackathon winner Narendra Patel, Sr. DevOps Engineer at Egnyte, to show off his Kong Gateway rate-limiting plugin, which allows you to rate-limit not just on the number of requests, but the bandwidth consumed too! Kong’s Online User Meetups are a place to learn about technologies within the Kong open source ecosystem. This interactive forum will give you the chance to ask our engineers questions and get ramped up on information relevant to your Kong journey.

Log4J, Log4Shell and Kong

If you’ve been online at all this week, chances are that you’ve heard about the Log4Shell zero-day (CVE-2021-44228) in Log4J, a popular Java logging library. The vulnerability enables Remote Code Execution (RCE), which allows attackers to run arbitrary code on the target’s machines. I know the first question that you all have is: “Is Kong affected by Log4Shell?” Let’s start with the good news: No Kong products are affected by this Log4J vulnerability.

Managing Asynchronous APIs (API:WORLD)

Polling-based APIs or the #RESTfulAPIs were the main building blocks of traditional integration stories. But with the need to respond to events in real-time, integration architecture has shifted from being polling-based to event-driven. With the emergence of reactive event-driven architecture, the asynchronous APIs were able to hold their distinct position in modern-day integrations. Even though the event-driven APIs provide their own advantages such as high resiliency, high responsiveness, and more, management of #asynchronousAPIs continues to be a challenge to the organizations.

KuppingerCole API Management and Security Leadership Compass Names WSO2 an Overall Leader

In the KuppingerCole API Management and Security Leadership Compass 2021, Lead Analyst and CTO Alexei Balaganksi states, “Our general recommendation for customers remains the same: both API management and API security should not be considered as standalone, isolated components of your IT infrastructures.

Building the RealWorld API in Low-code

RealWorld is a popular open-source project known as the mother of all demo apps. It is an exact clone of Medium.com (called Conduit) and can be built using any front-end and back-end. This article will share the journey to replicating the RealWorld REST API (Conduit) from scratch using Linx, a low-code developer tool. All stacks that integrate with Conduit will integrate with the newly created API. Technologies and tools used to develop RealWorld API: Notes

(APIs) Quantum Duality of "API as a Business and Technology"

Every thriving API program leverages the elements from business and technology equally. Alignment of business and technology strategy, the synergy between business and technical teams, and adaptability to the changes coming from either business or technology are fundamental characteristics of such an environment. Asanka Abeysinghe, WSO2, Chief Technology Evangelist will look at four areas, federation and business models, moving to the cloud, polyglot and heterogeneous approach, and modernizing development during this talk. He will also share real-world examples based on his involvement in numerous success stories.

GraphQL vs REST - a low-code API showdown

REST and (the newer) GraphQL APIs are the core technologies behind the vast most of today’s integrations. These APIs allow external developers to tap into the functionality of the major platforms and build in their custom functionality to suit their needs. The fundamental difference is that REST is an architectural design framework based on HTTP, while GraphQL is a query syntax that is not transport-dependent.

Creating a User Funnel in Moesif

User funnels allow businesses to analyze how individual users are using and converting within their product. Funnel metrics can show how many users are converting through each stage of the funnel and the average time it takes to do so. In this tutorial, Matt covers how to set up a conversion funnel analysis in Moesif using the User Funnels screen. Steps covered include: Navigating to the User Funnel screen Creating “steps” for each step in the funnel How to read and interpret the output

Building Smart O11y for Kuma With Elastic Observability

This blog was co-created by Ricardo Ferreira (Elastic) and Viktor Gamov (Kong). We love our microservices, but without a proper observability (O11y) strategy, they can quickly become cold, dark places cluttered with broken or unknown features. O11y is one of those technologies deemed created by causation: the only reason it exists is that other technologies pushed for it. There wouldn’t be need for O11y if, for example, our technologies haven’t gotten so complex across the years.

Using Elastic ML to Observe Your Kuma API Observability Metrics

Observability is catching on these days as the de-facto way to provide visibility into essential aspects of systems. It would be unwise for you not to leverage it with Kuma service mesh — the place that allows your services to communicate with the rest of the world. However, many observability solutions restrict themselves to the works: simple metric collection that provides them with dashboards. Expecting users to simply sit on their chairs and look at those metrics all day long is an invitation to failure, as we know that one can only do so much when they get tired and bored.

Webhooks vs API: Which is Better To Sync Data Between Apps

Webhooks vs API, oh well. When there is a talk about what method to use in order to seamlessly sync datasets between applications, platforms and databases (in other words, to perform application integration), APIs are often named as today’s best-practices method for handling this.

Building With Insomnia as a REST API Client

As more companies invest in a cloud native infrastructure, they’re choosing to prioritize their applications as microservices—architecting them into distinct servers. Each component is responsible for one (and only one) feature. For example, you might have Server A responsible for handling billing logic, Server B for handling user interaction and Server C for handling third-party user interactions.

How We Got a 12% Increase in RPS and a 37% Drop in Latency

At Kong, we run performance testing in CI in every commit or pull request that has a potential performance impact, as well as on each release. Thanks to the performance testing framework and its integration with Github Actions, we can easily get basic metrics like RPS and latency. Also, flame graphs to pinpoint the significant part that draws down performance. With that workflow in place, we figured one of the most significant parts of Kong’s hotpath is Nginx variable accesses.

4 Ways to Leverage Kong's jq Plugin

As part of the Kong Gateway 2.6 release, we shipped a brand new jq plugin for anyone with an enterprise license to use. It’s like we combined the request and response transformer plugins to form a single, more powerful plugin—supercharging the way we work with request and response bodies. If you’re not familiar with jq, it’s a JSON processing language that allows you to manipulate any JSON document and transform it however you need.

Simplifying Use of External APIs with Request/Response Translators

Snowpark has generated significant excitement and interest since it was announced. Snowpark is a developer framework that enables data engineers, data scientists, and data developers to code in their language of choice, and execute pipelines, machine learning (ML) workflows, and data applications faster and more securely. While many parts of Snowpark are in preview stages, External Functions entered General Availability earlier this year.

The Developer Playground now supports REST API

One of the best features in ThoughtSpot Everywhere is the Developer Playground. The Playground lets frontend Developers visually configure elements and generate JavaScript code to add into your web app. It is an amazing tool for testing and iterating configuration options before adding final elements such as Search, Liveboards, and visualizations into your web app. But what about a backend Developer who might be building solutions that utilize the Platform’s APIs?

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Service Mocks: Scaling a SaaS Demo with Traffic Replay

Building, running and scaling SaaS demo systems that run around the clock is a big engineering challenge. Through the power of traffic replay, we scaled our demos in a huge way. A few weeks ago we launched a new demo sandbox. This is actually a second generation version of our existing demo system that I built a few months ago (codename: decoy). Because the traffic viewer page shows the most recent data by default, you need to constantly be pumping new data in there. Any type of real-time SaaS system is going to have a similar requirement. So this needs to be planned.

4 Ways to Leverage User Metrics in Moesif

Without users, products mean nothing. So why is it that so many organizations analyze API and user behavior metrics as an afterthought? My theory would be that they just don’t have the right tools in place to actually collect, analyze, and use these usage metrics. With so many products aiming to improve their user experience and customer satisfaction, tools like Moesif are exactly what is needed.

Creating the Ultimate Analytics Stack with Moesif and Datadog

When looking at API analytics and monitoring platforms, many seem to be so similar that it’s hard to figure out the differences between them. We often hear this confusion from users and prospects. In a world with so many tools available, how do we figure out which ones are necessary and which are redundant? One of the most common questions we are asked revolves around how Moesif compares to Datadog and how they could work together.

Kong and Neosec: Behavioral Analytics With Response Automation

The Neosec platform integrates with Kong Gateway Enterprise to provide automated and continuous API discovery, API risk posture alerting and API protection through behavioral analytics and response automation. And it does all that while being out of band, using the logs shipped from Kong to Neosec.

11 Best Practices for Designing RESTful API

Although the RESTful Application Programming Interface (API) was first established in the year 2000, there are currently no set guidelines or standards for API development. Developers have experimented with many methods to improve REST API solutions throughout the years. Some of them were successful, while others were unsuccessful. APIs that are poorly developed is difficult to maintain over time and are prone to failure.

What's New (and Coming Soon) With Insomnia

For those who aren’t familiar with Insomnia, it’s Kong’s API testing, design and debugging platform. Insomnia’s product vision is to optimize API development by simplifying and automating a developer’s workflows. APIOps plays a key role in this vision, optimizing API development by simplifying and automating developers’ workflows.

How to manage your GraphQL APIs with Apigee

Over the past two decades REST APIs have emerged as a lightweight and flexible standard for enterprise data and backends get exposed to external, partner, and internal applications. Google Cloud’s Apigee is a leader in API Management, allowing users to manage REST APIs — define rate limits, enforce authentication and authorization, block clients that attempt to misuse an API, and ensure APIs work seamlessly as they are updated.

API Automation: What You Need to Know

IT automation is an essential business best practice that has enabled countless organizations to become more efficient. According to a survey by Salesforce, 95 percent of executives and directors see the value of automation, and 88 percent want to pursue automation as a key investment for their business. This general tenet holds for the specific case of API automation as well. APIs are a highly underrated, yet critical, technology that underpins the modern digital ecosystem.

5 Essential Considerations Prior to Building an API

An API is a process where one application, website, or software can talk to another and provides a way for the developers of one application to interact with the components of another application. The goal is to make it easier for people who are working on different projects at the same time to work together seamlessly. There are various reasons that an API may be needed. We can see many companies using APIs in their software development processes, such as Slack, Google Docs, Facebook, and Gmail.