What do you like best about the product?

The best what I like about API Connect was the analytics section, in diagnoising issues in production, our go to approach would be to check the API Connect logs. In the latest API Connect 10 version we had on our Cloud Pak. That version had the capability to show the processing time the request spent on each policy with in the API, so it gave us really good insights in identifying bottlenecks whether it was our gateway script or the downstream system itself and then take appropriate action.

The other feature was the capability of synchronizing data such as client ids and secrets. We had two seperate API connect deployments (Active and DR) and using the internal sub system backups of the main deployement and backup in the other cluster we were able to onboard one client and the same id and secret could be used in the other cluster, in case of enabling DR traffic.

Since most of our integrations were routed from the API Connect, it was a touch point for all the services for the organization so it was able to handle immense workloads.

It was also relatively easy to develop APIs and deploy it on the products. And with the role based access control we were able to make sure that only relevant users after review could publish the API's.

What do you dislike about the product?

The only problem which I observed was where we had two deployments (Active and DR) running in two seperate clusters, we had issues of analytics availaiblity at one place, other than that there weren't any issues from the development and deployment perspective.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The main problem that API Connect was solving was authentication and authorization, since we want the consumers to only access only those services for which they were provided the access to, furthermore the other direction which the organization was thinking was to use monetization capability with the API Connect to avoid API abuse by the consumers.

From the analytics perspective we onboarded the clients with perspective to business domain and region, so we were able to also have the stats on hand if the management team wanted to inquire the numbers for the calls from a certain region or domain or both.