API logging. It's a good idea?
What do you think of this idea?
I am a developer and develop api integrations daily.
I have built a tool that I need to monitor and log api calls.
The tool records the calls and responses of an api rest and on them I built a very simple dashboard that shows:
- call detail: headers, timestamp, body, result, timing etc ..
- number of calls in the last n hours, divided by api
- possibility to assign labels to groups of similar api to easily filter
- email alert with different criteria such as too low number of calls or too high a percentage of error
There are tools on the market that do a lot more, but include numerous other features geared for large companies.
What I would like to do is turn this homemade product into an MVP and launch it for a target of small / medium company developers.
How do you view the idea?
I would reframe it: instead of dealing with logs directly, integrate with existing applications (graylog, loki, and such..) , and just process those logs that belong to API calls, and present them in a meaningful way.
Usually a log solution is already in place, and you could benefit of easy integrations.
Logs are always important , and your idea is good . there is always a need for another logger at the end the question is how cheap and fast can you keep your server / logs cost? and which functionality is provided. maybe a more niche market can be a good place to start
As for small projects, start with few features for a few users using a relational DB as the first step and then scale using aws services such as aws lambda or sqs. Initially it would be usable only from. Net users. I don't know how much users I can reach with this limitation
why should you limit for .Net users ? you can adapt it to any coding language , the core of the service should be the backend
absolutely, the client part would be ready for .net, it is a nuget package that logs both requests and response automatically.
in a first phase, for other languages this operation is to be done manually by calling the rest api and passing correlationid between request and response and measure the total time elapsed from the call to the response for example.
Later I will create the specific sdks for each language.