Tutorial: Monitor published APIs

APPLIES TO: All API Management tiers

With Azure Monitor, you can visualize, query, route, archive, and take actions on the metrics or logs coming from your Azure API Management service. For an overview of Azure Monitor for API Management, see Monitor API Management.

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

Prerequisites

• Learn the Azure API Management terminology.
• Complete the following quickstart: Create an Azure API Management instance.
• Also, complete the following tutorial: Import and publish your first API.

View metrics of your APIs

API Management emits metrics every minute, giving you near real-time visibility into the state and health of your APIs. The following are the most frequently used metrics. For a list of all available metrics, see Metrics.

• Capacity - helps you make decisions about upgrading/downgrading your API Management services. The metric is emitted per minute and reflects the estimated gateway capacity at the time of reporting. The metric ranges from 0-100 calculated based on gateway resources such as CPU and memory utilization and other factors.

  Tip

  In the v2 service tiers and in workspace gateways, API Management has replaced the gateway capacity metric with separate CPU and memory utilization metrics. These metrics can also be used for scaling decisions and troubleshooting. Learn more

• Requests - helps you analyze API traffic going through your API Management services. The metric is emitted per minute and reports the number of gateway requests with dimensions. Filter requests by response codes, ___location, hostname, and errors.

To access metrics:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance. On the Overview page, on the Monitor tab, review key metrics for your APIs.

2. To investigate metrics in detail, select Monitoring > Metrics from the left menu.

   

   Tip

   In a workspace, you can view capacity metrics scoped to a workspace gateway. Navigate to Monitoring > Metrics in the left menu of a workspace gateway.

3. From the drop-down, select metrics you're interested in. For example, Requests.

4. The chart shows the total number of API calls. Adjust the time range to focus on periods of interest.

5. You can filter the chart using the dimensions of the Requests metric. For example, select Add filter, select Backend Response Code Category, enter 500 as the value. The chart shows the number of requests failed in the API backend.

Set up an alert rule

You can receive alerts based on metrics and activity logs. In Azure Monitor, configure an alert rule to perform an action when it triggers. Common actions include:

• Send an email notification
• Call a webhook
• Invoke an Azure Logic App

To configure an example alert rule based on a request metric:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance.

2. Select Monitoring > Alerts from the left menu.

   

3. Select + Create > Alert rule.

4. On the Condition tab:

   1. In Signal name, select Requests.
   2. In Alert logic, review or modify the default values for the alert. For example, update the static Threshold, which is the number of occurrences after which the alert should be triggered.
   3. In Split by dimensions, in Dimension name, select Gateway Response Code Category.
   4. In Dimension values, select 4xx, for client errors such as unauthorized or invalid requests. If the dimension value doesn't appear, select Add custom value and enter 4xx.
   5. In When to evaluate, accept the default settings, or select other settings to configure how often the rule runs. Select Next.

   

5. On the Actions tab, select or create one or more action groups to notify users about the alert and take an action. For example, create a new action group to send a notification email to admin@contoso.com. For detailed steps, see Create and manage action groups in the Azure portal.

   

6. On the Details tab of Create an alert rule, enter a name and description of the alert rule and select the severity level.

7. Optionally configure the remaining settings. Then, on the Review + create tab, select Create.

8. Optionally test the alert rule by using an HTTP client to simulate a request that triggers the alert. For example, run the following command in a terminal, substituting the API Management hostname with the hostname of your API Management instance:

   curl GET https://contoso.azure-api.net/non-existent-endpoint HTTP/1.1 
   

   An alert triggers based on the evaluation period, and it will send email to admin@contoso.com.

   Alerts also appear on the Alerts page for the API Management instance.

   

Activity logs

Activity logs provide insight into the operations on your API Management services. Using activity logs, you can determine the "what, who, and when" for any write operations (PUT, POST, DELETE) taken on your API Management services.

You can access activity logs in your API Management service, or access logs of all your Azure resources in Azure Monitor.

To view the activity log:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance.

2. Select Activity log.

   

3. Select the desired filtering scope and then Apply.

Resource logs

Resource logs (Azure Monitor logs) provide rich information about API Management operations and errors that are important for auditing and troubleshooting purposes. When enabled through a diagnostic setting, the logs collect information about the API requests that are received and processed by the API Management gateway.

To configure a diagnostic setting for collection of resource logs:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance.

2. In the left menu, under Monitoring, select Diagnostic settings > + Add diagnostic setting.

   

3. On the Diagnostic setting page, enter or select details for the setting:

   1. Diagnostic setting name: Enter a descriptive name.
   2. Category groups: Optionally make a selection for your scenario.
   3. Under Categories: Select one or more categories. For example, select Logs related to ApiManagement Gateway to collect logs for most requests to the API Management gateway.
   4. Under Destination details, select one or more options and specify details for the destination. For example, send logs to an Azure Log Analytics workspace, archive logs to a storage account, or stream them to an event hub. For more information, see Diagnostic settings in Azure Monitor.
   5. Select Save.

   Tip

   If you select a Log Analytics workspace, you can choose to store the data in a resource-specific table (for example, an ApiManagementGatewayLogs table) or store in the general AzureDiagnostics table. We recommend using the resource-specific table for log destinations that support it. Learn more

4. After configuring details for the log destination or destinations, select Save.

View logs and metrics in Azure Log Analytics

If you enable collection of logs or metrics in a Log Analytics workspace, it can take a few minutes for data to appear in Azure Monitor.

To view the data:

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your API Management instance.

2. In the left menu, under Monitoring, select Logs.

3. Run queries to view the data. Several sample queries are provided, or run your own. For example, the following query retrieves the most recent 24 hours of data from the ApiManagementGatewayLogs table:

   ApiManagementGatewayLogs
   | where TimeGenerated > ago(1d) 
   

   

For more information about using resource logs for API Management, see:

• Log Analytics tutorial.
• Overview of log queries in Azure Monitor.

Modify API logging settings

When you use the portal to create a diagnostic setting to enable collection of API Management gateway or generative AI gateway (LLM) logs, logging is enabled with default settings. Default settings do not include details of requests or responses such as request or response bodies. You can adjust the logging settings for all APIs, or override them for individual APIs. For example, adjust the sampling rate or the verbosity of the gateway log data, enable logging of LLM request or response messages, or disable logging for some APIs.

For details about the logging settings, see the Diagnostic - Create or Update and the API diagnostic - Create or Update REST API reference pages.

To configure logging settings for all APIs:

1. In the left menu of your API Management instance, select APIs > APIs > All APIs.
2. Select the Settings tab from the top bar.
3. Scroll down to the Diagnostic Logs section, and select the Azure Monitor tab.
4. Review the settings and make changes if needed. Select Save.

To configure logging settings for a specific API:

1. In the left menu of your API Management instance, select APIs > APIs and then the name of the API.
2. Select the Settings tab from the top bar.
3. Scroll down to the Diagnostic Logs section, and select the Azure Monitor tab.
4. Review the settings and make changes if needed. Select Save.

Next steps

In this tutorial, you learned how to:

Advance to the next tutorial: