Miguel Afonso Caetano"Normally, you don't visit your own API documentation that often, right? I mean, if you already know how your API works, why would you want to consult its documentation? Conversely, there's a place you visit—or should visit—very often, with information you care about your API. I assume you have an API dashboard where you can review metrics such as the ones I described earlier. Usually, the dashboard lives close to the API gateway, or somewhere where other company-wide observability tools reside. What I'm proposing here, in short, is that the API documentation can be the best place to present those metrics to you, the producer.
Being able to see the metrics you care about right near the documentation for each part of your API feels refreshing. You could, for instance, be looking at the reference of one operation and immediately see its usage trend, the error rate, the number of active consumers in the last hour, and so on. What's more, some of the information visible only to you could also be actionable. You could, for instance, open the pending support requests to see what the top complaints are. Or, you could immediately check why there's such a percentage of errors on one single operation.
While most information would be restricted to you, the producer, I argue that some things could even be openly shared with your API consumers. Imagine being a consumer and seeing a list of "popular" API operations right on the documentation. Or understanding if a certain operation is producing a high error rate. All these things could be easily available in the API documentation."
https://apichangelog.substack.com/p/producer-oriented-api-documentation
#TechnicalWriting #APIs #APIDocumentation #SoftwareDocumentation #APIMetrics #APIAnalytics #SoftwareDevelopment
Matthew Reinbold
Mike Amundsen