Ask HN: What service do you use to collect and analyse your API data?

5 points by pototo666 4 years ago | 2 comments

Hi HN. I asked a question here before. [my app is slow. What do I do now?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29700098). HN users kindly instructed me to record logs about my api request as a starting point. I have done accordingly and found some slow api requests and fix them.

But recording api request and analysing them with custom python code is not as interesting as creating features for my app.

Are there any service that I can use to simplify this task?

I've used Mixpanel to collect and analyse my user behaviours. So far it is working great.

I'm thinking of using Mixpanel to collect and analyse my api request data. But I'm not sure Mixpanel is good fit for this task. (I'm not an expert in Mixpanel though).

Have you used any service to do such task? I would be happy to pay for the service.

Thanks :)

ndimares 4 years ago |

You could try Akita Software: https://www.akitasoftware.com/ who exists in this space, but anecdotally devs I've spoken to who have tested that solution haven't loved it (find it hard/unintuitive to use). I assume a full investment (Data warehouse + datadog and alerting framework) would be overkill for your use case?

This problem is something I've spent some time thinking through/working on addressing, because it does feel like there should be something easy & low cost for devs to use, a mixpanel for API usage as it were. If you'd want to talk about it offline, drop me a message. Best of luck!

pototo666 4 years ago | |

Thanks for sharing Akita. It looks promising. It seems to be an early stage product. I would keep an eye on it.

Like you said, there should be something like a mixpanel for API usage. Now when I think of it, it is not as an urgent problem as user data analysis. I need to collect user data after I have qualitatively validate my product and started doing marketing campaign. But I would not need to analyse my api usage after I hit a certain level of usage.

API monitor seems to be a less urgent and easier task with less market size.

I want to pay for it, if there is any simple service that I can integrate in 2 hours out there.

Speaking of a full investment (Data warehouse + datadog and alerting framework), I actually don't know what it is, lol. I'm an dumb developer, I just want to pay, read docs, write some integration code in 2 hours, test and then use the service. I have visited datadogs webiste before I post. The amount of info there is beyond my comprehension (or beyond the attention budget that I am willing to spend).

Anyway, thanks for you info :)