Analytics

Overview

The Analytics feature enables the API Platform to capture, process, and publish API request and response data for observability and business insights. Analytics data is collected asynchronously from the gateway without impacting request latency and is published to an external analytics platform for further analysis and visualization.

This capability allows platform administrators and business stakeholders to gain visibility into API usage patterns, traffic behavior, latency characteristics, and consumer activity across the platform.

Features

• Asynchronous collection of API request and response data
• Policy-enriched analytics metadata capture
• Zero impact on request/response latency
• Batched and configurable publishing to external analytics platforms
• Horizontally scalable analytics processing pipeline
• Pluggable publisher model (supports multiple analytics backends)

Prerequisites

• Active Moesif Account and an Application ID. For obtaining the Application ID, follow these steps:
  • Step 1: Sign up in Moesif
  • Sept 2: Follow the onboarding wizard.
  • Sept 3: During the sign up process, you will receive a Collector Application ID for your configured application. Copy this value and keep it saved.

Note

For more detailed instructions and advanced configuration options, refer to the official Moesif Documentation.

Configuration

Analytics is configured entirely through the gateway config.toml file and is enabled at a system level.

Note

Analytics is a consumer of a shared data-capture pipeline called the collector. The collector has no enabled flag of its own — it activates automatically whenever analytics.enabled (or traffic_logging.enabled) is true. See Traffic Logging for the other consumer of this same pipeline, which writes a stdout JSON line per request instead of publishing to an external SaaS.

System Parameters (config.toml)

Analytics

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
enabled	boolean	Yes	false	Enables or disables analytics globally, and activates the collector.
enabled_publishers	array of strings	No	["moesif"]	Publisher names to activate. Currently only moesif is supported.

Publishers

Each entry in enabled_publishers must have a matching configuration table under [analytics.publishers.<name>].

Moesif ([analytics.publishers.moesif])

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
application_id	string	Yes	Moesif application identifier
moesif_base_url	string	No	Moesif ingestion endpoint (default https://api.moesif.net)
publish_interval	int	Yes	Interval (seconds) between publish cycles
event_queue_size	int	Yes	Maximum events held in memory
batch_size	int	Yes	Maximum events per batch
timer_wakeup_seconds	int	Yes	Publisher timer resolution

Data capture ([collector])

Analytics captures request/response headers and bodies through the shared [collector] section (also used by Traffic Logging). Capture is off by default — enable only what Moesif needs:

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
request_body	boolean	false	Capture the full request body and attach it to published events.
response_body	boolean	false	Capture the full response body and attach it to published events.
request_headers	boolean	false	Capture all request headers and attach them to published events.
response_headers	boolean	false	Capture all response headers and attach them to published events.
ignore_path_prefixes	array of strings	[]	Path prefixes (e.g. /health, /metrics) for which no analytics event is produced at all.

Note

Masking/redaction is a per-consumer, presentation-time concern, not a collector guarantee — the collector hands every enabled consumer the same raw captured data. Moesif always receives unmasked headers, regardless of any masked_headers configuration used by Traffic Logging.

ALS transport ([collector.server])

This section configures both the Envoy access log streaming settings and the ALS (Access Log Service) server that receives those logs. It is shared with Traffic Logging — the controller reads it to configure Envoy's gRPC access-log sink, and the policy-engine reads it to configure the receiving ALS server.

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
mode	string	No	"uds"	Transport mode: "uds" (Unix domain socket) or "tcp".
buffer_flush_interval	duration	No	1000000000	Maximum time Envoy waits(in nanoseconds) before flushing buffered access log entries.
buffer_size_bytes	int	No	16384	Maximum size of the in-memory buffer used to batch access log entries before sending them to ALS server.
grpc_request_timeout	duration	No	20000000000	Timeout duration Envoy waits(in nanoseconds) for a response from the ALS server before considering the log delivery attempt failed.
shutdown_timeout	duration	No	"600s"	Maximum time allowed for the ALS server to gracefully shut down while completing in-flight log processing.
als_plain_text	boolean	No	true	Use plaintext gRPC
public_key_path	string	No	-	Path to the public key used for securing ALS communication when transport-level encryption or authentication is enabled.
private_key_path	string	No	-	Path to the private key used for securing ALS communication when transport-level encryption or authentication is enabled.
max_message_size	int	No	1000000000	Maximum size of a single gRPC message that the ALS server is allowed to receive from Envoy.
max_header_limit	int	No	8192	Maximum allowed size of request or response headers processed by the ALS server

Note

The ALS gRPC port is fixed at 18090 and is not configurable — this guarantees the controller and policy-engine sides can never disagree on it. The hostname for the ALS connection is automatically derived from the policy-engine configuration. The internal log name identifier is set to "envoy_access_log" and is not configurable.

Deprecated keys

The following [analytics] keys still work, but are deprecated in favor of the shared [collector] / [collector.server] sections above. They are migrated automatically at load time with a warning, so existing configs keep working unchanged:

Deprecated key	Migrated onto	Notes
analytics.allow_payloads	collector.request_body + collector.response_body	Directional flags (below) win over allow_payloads.
analytics.send_request_body / send_response_body	collector.request_body / response_body	—
analytics.grpc_event_server.*	collector.server.*	Whole-section migration, applied only while [collector.server] is unset and analytics.enabled = true.
analytics.access_logs_service.*	collector.server.*	Same migration as above; server_port is dropped since the ALS port is now a fixed constant.

Configuration Examples

Integrate Moesif Publisher

[collector]
request_headers = true
response_headers = true

[collector.server]
mode = "uds"

[analytics]
enabled = true
enabled_publishers = ["moesif"]

[analytics.publishers.moesif]
application_id = "<MOESIF_APPLICATION_ID>"
moesif_base_url = "https://api.moesif.net"
publish_interval = 5
event_queue_size = 10000
batch_size = 50
timer_wakeup_seconds = 3

Use Cases

• API Usage Visibility – Understand how APIs are consumed across tenants and applications.
• Operational Insights – Observe traffic volume, response behavior, and latency trends.
• Business Intelligence – Support product and business decisions using API analytics data.
• Platform Monitoring – Gain observability into API behavior without impacting performance.