Monitoring API usage

This page describes how to use API metrics to track and understand your usage of Google APIs and Google Cloud APIs.

Google APIs produce detailed usage metrics that can help you:

• Track and understand your usage of Google APIs.
• Monitor performance of your applications and Google APIs.
• Discover problems between your applications and Google APIs.

It can dramatically speed up resolution times when you troubleshoot problems or need technical support from Google.

The metrics that Google APIs produce are the standard signals that Google's own Site Reliability Engineers use to assess the health of a service. These metrics covers request counts, error rates, total latencies, backend latencies, request sizes, and response sizes. For the API metric definitions, see Cloud Monitoring documentation.

You can view API metrics in two places: API Dashboard and Cloud Monitoring. The metrics you see are specific to your project, and they don't reflect the overall service status.

Using the API Dashboard

The simplest way to view your API metrics is to use the Google Cloud console's API Dashboard. You can see an overview of all your API usage, or you can drill down to your usage of a specific API.

To see an overview of your API usage:

1. Visit Cloud console's APIs and Services section. The main API Dashboard is displayed by default. In this page you can see all the APIs you currently have enabled for your project, as well as overview charts for the following metrics:

   • Traffic: the number of requests per second made by or about your project to enabled APIs
   • Errors: the percentage of requests to enabled APIs that resulted in errors
   • Median latency: the median latency for requests to enabled APIs, if available".

To view usage details for a specific API:

1. Select the API you want to view in the main API Dashboard list of APIs. The API's Overview page shows a more detailed traffic chart with a breakdown by response code.

2. For even more detailed usage information, select View metrics. By default, the following pre-built charts are displayed, though more are available:

   • Traffic by response code
   • Errors by API method
   • Overall latency at the 50th, 95th, and 99th percentile
   • Latency by API method (median)

3. If you want to add more charts, you can select additional pre-built charts from the Select Graphs drop-down menu.

Using Cloud Monitoring

If you use Cloud Monitoring, you can dive deeper into available metrics data using the Metrics Explorer to give you greater insight into your API usage. Cloud Monitoring supports a wide variety of metrics, which you can combine with filters and aggregations for new and insightful views into your application performance. For example, you can combine a request count metric with a filter on the HTTP Response Code class to build a dashboard that shows error rates over time, or you can look at the 95th percentile latency of requests to the Cloud Pub/Sub API.