As a developer, you want your development cycle to be highly efficient. Part of that entails 1) easily discovering and reusing relevant assets with confidence and 2) understanding where and how your assets are being used (and reused), so you can make informed decisions.
Anypoint Exchange, a key component of Anypoint Platform, enables developers and administrators to quickly and easily create application networks and composable enterprises. It integrates seamlessly in the customers’ “flow of work” and provides capabilities to produce and consume reusable assets. Assets are resources that can be created, discovered, and shared. Exchange supports various types of reusable assets, including various types of APIs (REST, GraphQL, etc.), API spec fragments, custom assets, examples, integration assets (connectors, etc.), and automation assets (RPA, etc.).
One component of Exchange’s core value proposition is driving efficiency through reuse – reusable, pre-built assets help jumpstart the developer journey. The new asset engagement dashboard helps you quantify engagement and usage (key drivers of reuse) on a per-asset basis, offering insight into your assets’ performance.
Key benefits of this new feature include:
- Drive growth, engagement, and reuse across the entire catalog
- Access usage metrics and engagement scores to get a composite view into how your assets are being utilized
- Track and manage asset adoption with out-of-the-box dashboards
- View performance analytics of your entire asset library in one place
Asset engagement metrics dashboard (Administrator view)
Users with the Exchange Administrator role can view usage and engagement metrics for API specification fragments and REST APIs using the dashboard. The usage metrics measure the following:
- # of times an asset is downloaded from Exchange
- # of imports from API Designer
- # of imports from Anypoint Studio
- # of dependents
- # of contracts
The asset engagement score is a composite metric that can be used to measure the relative usage of an asset in Exchange. The dashboard displays metrics for up to the top 50 assets for a period of the last 7 days, 30 days, or 60 days, ranked by engagement score. You can filter the top assets by API specification fragments and REST API types and by one or more organizations.
The following graphic shows the usage and engagement metrics dashboard:
This feature allows users with the Exchange Administrator role to have a holistic view of asset usage and consumption in their organization, providing insight into reusability of assets and enabling them to further drive efficient practices.
Metrics for a Specific Asset and Version
This new feature also allows you to view engagement metrics for an individual asset and/or specific version. You can do so by navigating to the asset details page of a supported asset and selecting Asset version engagement in the left navigation sidebar.
The following graphic shows the asset details page with usage and engagement metrics.
We collect and analyze a broad range of asset metadata (including version and lifecycle state, amongst others) and metrics (including engagement contribution, downloads, and imports, amongst others). See the documentation for more details and definitions.
This view can help you identify asset versions that have high overall usage versus versions with low usage. This information can help you better understand the performance and stickiness of specific asset versions within your organization, helping you make more informed decisions when it comes to reuse and making the development journey more efficient.
Availability and future support
Today, this new feature is available for users with the Exchange Administrator role and asset owners with Exchange contributor permission. Additionally, the two asset types that are currently supported are 1) REST APIs and 2) API spec fragments. In the future, we’ll strive to support a wider range of asset types available on Exchange to provide you with a more holistic view of usage, engagement, and reuse within your organization.
Conclusion
This new Anypoint Exchange feature closes the feedback loop and provides new, data-driven insights into asset engagement and usage. This feature will help developers better understand how their assets are being used, so they can drive improvements around documentation, metadata tagging, and more. Administrators can use this information to identify top adopted assets and drive best practices across the entire catalog, while also better understanding which types of assets are valuable to developers. Finally, Exchange plans to use these metrics to drive further improvements and product experiences. Please follow the release notes for future iterations of this feature!
About the author
Ria Joshi is a Product Manager at MuleSoft focused on Anypoint Exchange. In her role, she strives to bring about a data-driven product culture. Outside of work, Ria is a long-distance runner and avid hiker.